


the first who ever did

by nostaljinks



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: 33k of alex and michael looking after each other, 5+1 Things, Alex "Sinnamon Roll Too Good Too Pure For This World" Manes, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Found Family Dynamics Or Bust, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Michael "Do You Need Me To Die For U Bc I Can Do That" Guerin, Misunderstandings, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn, also Some Kissing™, and being soft, but also really dumb, this is literally just
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-25 22:24:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20731670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nostaljinks/pseuds/nostaljinks
Summary: Five times Michael saves Alex + 1 time Alex saves Michael back.





	the first who ever did

**Author's Note:**

> 3 weeks ago i binged roswell nm with friends went into a fugue state and woke up with this
> 
> spoilers up thru s1 finale, tho half this fic takes place pre-show so if ur just here for the gays & hurt n'comfort please make yourselves at home. the other half deals with events post-finale hopefully in a way that is Fun and Zesty and not at all boring!! i had a lot of fun with this. geez i love this show!!!!!
> 
> dedicated to k, a terrible influence and a wonderful friend. 
> 
> **CONTENT WARNINGS:** canon typical violence and alien antics, references to: homophobia & child abuse, a few scenes of torture & medical experimentation

* * *

There's things I wanna say to you  
But I'll just let you live  
Like if you hold me without hurting me  
You'll be the first who ever did

-Cinnamon Girl, Lana Del Rey 

* * *

1.

Alex Manes is walking funny. 

It’s 8 a.m. on a Tuesday morning at Roswell High and normally, well, normally Michael would just listen to the onslaught of lewd sex jokes (_wow someone got railed last night) _and taunts _(finally pull that stick out of your ass, Manes?)_ from their classmates and be done with it. But Alex Manes, who struts like he came out of the womb in uniform…he’s walking funny. Favoring his right side. His shoulder lifted high towards his ear like he’s braced against something, elbow tucked up to his side. It takes him forever to sit down at his desk, a careful maneuver and rotation of his body and then, when he finally lets himself fall into the chair, the air around him shivers and Michael catches a sharp whiff of something—

Menthol. Bengay. 

Michael stares at him. 

The teacher hasn’t entered the room yet. Alex flips his hoodie over his head and curls up on his desk, and even doing that looks painful. His eyes close, like he could sleep for a million years. He turns his head to the side and—there. Along the underside of his jaw. A bad hickey, some will probably assume. But there’s no mistaking a fist for a kiss. Michael knows an uppercut when he sees one. 

He goes on staring, but Alex doesn’t so much as open his eyes, curled into his desk like it’s a luxury pillow. Mr. Beech comes in and starts talking about their prep for the quiz next week and Alex doesn’t so much as move. It’s ridiculous to admit, but Michael spends most of the class just making sure he’s breathing. 

Normally Michael wouldn’t say anything. Michael _shouldn’t_ say anything. It’s just. 

Someone’s going to notice. 

No one noticed when Michael had wounds, of course. The trick is hiding in plain sight. Michael Guerin got into so many rough and tumble scrapes that no one fucking cared what his face looked like. A bruise or a cut or a swollen lip was just something Guerin had coming, always. No one bothered to wonder or ask, to look twice. Michael Guerin was a troublemaker. Teachers said it, CPS workers said it, hell, the Evanses said it as they walked out the door of the group home with the only family he’d ever known. He was a bad seed. He had it coming. 

But Alex Manes was different. Certified golden boy. Son of a line of decorated military men. Smart. A model behavior in the classroom. Even if Kyle Valenti and his pack of wolves picked on him, Manes was still universally liked by everyone else. He was good. 

Which meant someone was going to notice the limping and the bruise if he didn’t do something about it quick. 

World History flies by and Michael couldn’t tell you whether they’re discussing the Ottoman Empire or The Gulf War. He’s too busy measuring the uneven way Alex Manes is breathing. 

They’ve never really spoken much before outside of _do you understand this assignment _or _do you have a spare pencil_. Social groups run in circles that don’t overlap much—Alex is friends with all the smart kids, like Liz Ortecho and Maria DeLuca, while Michael isn’t really friends with much of anyone. He doesn’t know much about Alex that isn’t gleaned through observation, like how when they get candy after a pop quiz he always eats the purple Skittles first because they’re his least favorite, or how, yes, he always has a spare pencil. They’re both freshman in a pretty big high school and they only share first period history together but there’s no definitive reason that Michael should care. He shouldn’t. 

He waits until the bell rings to make his move, watching Alex get up from his desk in agonizing increments, not wincing, but very clearly breathing through something that seems to be wracking his entire body. 

“Hey.” Michael follows him out into the hallway and snags the edge of Alex’s sleeve and Alex _flinches_. Jesus Christ. 

“Hey?” Alex sounds more confused than annoyed, which Michael supposes is a good sign. Or maybe a bad sign, too tired to be annoyed that the school burnout is talking to the golden boy. 

Someone jostles Michael’s shoulder as they push past him, and he can’t—there’s no way to say _here let me clean you up_ in a way that’s not going to put a walking fucking target on Manes’ back, or, a bigger one than usual. So Michael does what Michael knows how to do and drags Alex into the locker room and into the out of order bathroom, kicking the cement block in front of the door, the little hole in the wall where he goes when he’s pretending to smoke but really just trying to give his mind space to breathe. 

“Hey—what the hell—” Alex cuts off as Michael swings his backpack off his shoulder, rustling through stray homework and pencils for what he needs. When he pops up with it, grinning, Alex looks baffled. 

“For your—” Michael gestures at Alex’s face. “You’re a lighter skin tone than me, so it’ll look a little weird, but better than black and blue.” 

He holds it out. Alex looks utterly horrified. Like the small tube of drugstore brand cover-up will burst into flames if he so much as touches it. Like just being seen with makeup will confirm some horrible secret that the rest of the world seems to be in on. 

Michael’s not really one to tune into the gossip loop, but he’d be lying if he acted dumb and pretended he hadn’t heard the rumors. It’s high school, people are the worst. But Michael doesn’t know how to say _dude I don’t give a shit that you’re queer_ without it sounding like an accusation. And he also knows from personal experience the one (1) time he opened up to a social worker that he’d rather fucking die than spew some bullshit like _it gets better_, because he’s had that cliche thrown at him and it sucked. It did not make him feel any better. 

But Alex is still staring at the tube of foundation like it’s going to bite him so Michael figures keeping things strictly professional is the best way to go. “Look, I don’t know what happened and I’m not going to ask, but others are going to if they notice you walking around looking like _that_. This is just to make the bruise blend in. Promise.” 

Alex doesn’t exactly relax, but he nods and, well, he’s clearly not volunteering to do it himself. So.

Michael digs a little deeper into his bag and pulls out the makeup sponge that he stole from Izzy’s room last time he came over. He knew she wouldn’t miss it, and if she did the Evanses would just buy her another anyhow. He needed it more. 

“C’mere,” he gently loops his hand around Alex’s skinny wrist and guides him over to the bathroom mirror. He wets the blender and daubs the foundation off his hand, the way he learned from watching Izzy do her makeup in the morning, feigning disinterest but secretly taking notes. He’d hated the foster parents that they’d stuck him with in Roswell, but he’d rather fucking die then have to move away again because someone found out that they weren’t the best people. 

“Was it that obvious?” Alex asks, apprehensive as he watches Michael’s movements closely. 

“Nah,” Michael lies, giving a cocky grin. “I’m just an expert at this sort of thing.”

It’s a confession that Michael hadn’t meant to make. But he’s already applying makeup to Alex fucking Manes’ jaw, so. Why not throw all caution to the wind? 

It’s not like it’s Michael’s biggest secret to keep. 

Carefully, he tilts Alex’s jaw back, feeling peach fuzz beneath the pad of his thumb as he gets a good look at the bruise. Starts blotting, muttering a brief apology when Alex hisses, swears a bit, the skin still tender, but thankfully not broken. Alex holds very still, like he’s braced for another blow, so Michael takes things gentle. If he were doing this to himself he’d be done in fifteen seconds flat but Alex looks like he hasn’t slept in days and also like he’s about to bolt so Michael moves slow, keeping the pressure of his touch as light as he possibly can. 

“Do you—” A muscle twitches in Alex’s jaw as he stops, starts over again. “Where’d you—”

“Frozen peas for the bruised ribs,” Michael cuts him off, ignoring the sharp inhale. “Twenty minutes on and off. Don’t bind them, the bandage just prevents healing. Try breathing exercises if you can, slow and deep. If the pain keeps up more than a few weeks, you’ll need to go to a doctor.” 

He’s very focused on covering the bruise, but Alex’s eyes are locked on him, flicking back and forth like Michael’s a particularly difficult code to solve. 

“Thank—”

“Don’t thank me,” says Michael, and for a moment has to grapple with some righteous fury that he has to administer first aid to a boy who should be, by all definitions, the safest boy in town. He should be able to defend himself against bullies. With a family reputation like his, with the money and the connections and the golden boy trust? He should _know_.

Unless it’s something his family can’t protect him from. Unless it’s his family. 

He would never ask, no matter how badly he wants to, and he doesn’t know for sure, but he can wager a guess. He remembers the first time he saw Master Sergeant Manes—in uniform, at Sunday church service, back when Michael was living with Evangelical foster parents and had to go every other day. He remembers seeing Manes at the front of the parrish, heard the way everyone talked about him, much of the same drivel. Master Sergeant Jesse Manes was highly respected in the community, a war hero, a Patriot, a man of principle, of God. 

Michael’s kind—they leave behind marks. Signs. This whole town was obsessed with them. Crop circles. Tattoos. Lines carved deep into the surface of the Earth. Scorch marks that never fade, cannot be erased. 

He searches for a shadow of the person behind the hurt in Alex’s body, like they’re there lurking beneath the bruise, worked under the surface of his skin like a sickness, slid between his ribs like a sharp object. But all he sees is Alex, a face of soft lines and softer brown eyes. 

“Do you ever want to fight back?” Alex isn’t looking at him anymore, gaze now locked on his reflection in the mirror, where the shape of the bruise has now morphed into a strange sort of five o’clock shadow, if you squint. “I know that’s stupid, and it would just make things worse, but do you? Do you ever just get so—”

“Yeah,” responds Michael, thinking of every time his head started screaming, that pitch perfect ring of truth within him, a power greater than everyone whoever hurt him combined. Michael is not a violent person but in those moments, cowering against the wall, hands up to protect his face, writhing beneath the glowing cherry of a cigarette, yes of course he wanted to hurt. Of course, he wanted revenge. Of course, he wanted to cause the same sort of pain that was being caused to him. 

“What holds you back?” Alex asks, now meeting Michael’s eyes in the mirror. Looking at him now, Michael always used to think those were soldier’s eyes. Flat, expressionless, blank and ready to follow orders, like father like son. But they’re a warm and wide brown, and his hair is unwashed and unkempt, like he’d meant to shower and brush it out but hadn’t. He’s not a soldier. He’s just a kid. 

“My siblings,” Michael answers, and doesn’t offer anything else. 

He doesn’t know how to explain that Max and Isobel are his compass, the thing that keeps him grounded in Roswell when the only thing he wants to do is raze the city to the ground, pour salt on the ashes. He doesn’t know how to explain to Alex that every time he wants to hurt someone he sees Max and Izzy, clear as day in his head. He sees Izzy in the desert, crying, traumatized. He sees Max, terrified, the air around him crackling with power. He sees himself, burying the body, digging a grave, and deciding in that instant that there was nothing he wouldn’t do to keep them safe. Nothing he wouldn’t endure to keep them close. 

“Must be nice.” Alex grimaces. Flint Manes wasn’t in their year, but Michael had seen him trolling the hallways with the other seniors. A bully and a bigot and a womanizer all in one. Every awful thing that Alex didn’t seem to be capable of. It would drive Michael crazy, not having Iz and Max to ground him. He doesn’t know what he’d do. What he’d become. 

It’s kind of a miracle that Manes is even standing here. He doesn’t seem to be any product of his environment apart from the bruise, the pained way he leans on the sink. 

“I didn’t know that you had…” Alex doesn’t seem to know how to finish that sentence. “I feel like I should be apologizing. For not realizing. But I also know that if the roles were switched, I’d hate hearing that. So.”

Alex seems to wrestle with that for a moment, like not being a totally nice and wonderful person is physically hurting him. “I can’t thank you. I can’t apologize to you. What _can _I do?” 

“Hmmm. Tell me how _brave_ I am,” Michael winks, dramatic, and his stomach swoops at the twitch that Alex’s lips give. “Tell me how courageous and strong I am for keeping all this so repressed and maintaining my roguish beauty. Tell me my scars make me sexy, that my tortured soul is so beautiful and inspiring.” 

That gets him; Alex smiles, huffs this gentle laugh that seems to echo in the bathroom and Michael...well, Michael’s a little stunned by it. The way he is by most people who are unexpectedly and suddenly kind to him. In fourth grade he fell in love with Dayanara Sixkiller because she gave him her extra Jell-O cup and at summer Bible camp last year he crushed on his bunkmate for _months_, all because he made Michael a lanyard keychain. 

There are worse things, Michael knows, then falling a little bit in love with everyone who shows him that the world isn’t always a hundred percent horrible. 

Alex Manes—pensive, well-behaved, do-gooder Alex Manes—smiles. Michael can’t help but hope that someone with a smile like that is going to be okay eventually. 

“They can’t pity you if you’re not sorry,” Michael offers, a bit dazed in the wake of that smile. “Just like they can’t discover your secret if you’re not hiding.” 

He’s talking about the bruises, initially. Hide in plain sight, he means to say. But Alex looks at him, and Michael realizes he’s gone and started another conversation entirely. 

“Fine,” Alex’s mouth twists wrly. “I won’t apologize. And I won’t say thank you. But I owe you one, Guerin. I won’t forget.”

Michael makes a big show of rolling his eyes and sighing. “Whatever, Manes.”

“I won’t,” says Alex quietly, the intensity of his voice holding still for a beat. 

Then the bell is ringing, and they’re late for their next class, and Alex moves into the light just as Michael says, “Ah, one sec, let me just blend this in a little more.” 

He thumbs at Alex’s soft chin, the corner of his mouth where the foundation looks too unnatural, feels Alex’s surprised intake of breath on his wrist and Alex’s wide wide gaze on him and wonders if all destruction and ruin and pain is always violent. If there might be other ways to die, slow slow. 

“Frozen peas,” Michael breathes, and then he’s wiping his fingers on his jeans and jogging off to freshman gym. 

***

2.

Emancipation tastes like street tacos. Michael’s got ten of them. Or—had—he’s been eating them one by one the whole drive down the 285 back to Roswell from Santa Fe. He bought them off a street vendor in Old Town, dancing his way down the block from some federal building where he signed off on his paperwork, bid his foster parents an awkward goodbye and a fuck-you farewell. 

He’s got a car, and it’s a car that he fixed up himself while mucking horseshit and other odd jobs on all the ranches around town, after school, before school, on weekends. He’s got a car, he’s got a job, he’s got a place sort of lined up but doesn’t mind living out of the truck bed if he has to. He’s going to live. 

Six months ago, something just _clicked_. A plucky new guidance counselor who didn’t know the Michael Guerin reputation called Michael into her office to inform him that he wasn’t a complete screwup, that despite his questionable attendance record and likeability among authority figures—he’d scored in the 99th percentile on the PSAT and his grades were nearly spotless. The word ‘college’ had sounded a little, well, _alien_ to him. He almost thought the counselor was joking. But she’d taken out some pamphlets, explaining what he’d need to do, how to do it, the ways she could help so he didn’t have to pay for everything on his own. 

He’d left her office and walked into the bright heat of the world and suddenly it wasn’t just the desert and the sky and nothing else for miles. Suddenly there was a town, far away, with a university, and it was calling Michael’s name. 

A week later he had a plan mapped out with a list of schools to apply to. A fee waiver for the SAT test. A month later, the day after his sixteenth birthday, he’d filed for emancipation from his foster parents. 

Now, for the first time in his life, Michael has hope in his belly. He has a fire under his ass. He’s not gonna be who everyone assumes he is. He’s not gonna become another statistic of the system. He’s going to get a degree. Hell, maybe he can learn enough to help him solve some of the mystery behind their past. There are endless possibilities. Endless opportunities. Michael wants to swallow them all. 

But for now he’s got tacos and a Saturday afternoon heat-breeze licking through the window of his truck. A car stereo that’s twenty years ahead of the rest of the car. He loosens the tie from the thrift-store suit he bought to look professional and competent at the emancipation hearing, hangs it on the rearview mirror like a talisman. 

The _You Are Now Entering Roswell! _Sign flies by, and Michael Guerin feels cautiously optimistic about the future. It’s such a strange and unfamiliar sensation he almost doesn’t know what to do with himself. Going to see Max and Iz with the good news feels like the obvious choice, though. 

He’s halfway there, passing the outskirts of the city park when he spots a familiar figure walking, head bent. Alex Manes has his shoulders hunched up, earbuds in, and seems completely oblivious to the world around him, including Kyle Valenti & Co. prowling behind him. 

One of the assholes kicks a stray beer can off the pavement, guffawing when it bounces off Alex’s shoulder. Alex keeps walking, but his fists are clenched at his sides. 

Maybe not so oblivious. 

Then Michael’s driven past and they’re all fading in the rear view mirror. One of the guys jeers at Alex—Michael can’t hear the word but he sees the shape of it on the guy’s mouth, and that’s all it takes. 

He whips the truck around so fast the tires screech, gunning the gas and feeling rowdy as he pulls up directly onto the curb between Alex and the group. The guys scatter. Kyle stumbles and fall on his ass.

Michael may be emancipated and on his way up in the world, but some shit-kicking habits are just really hard to shake. 

“You alright there, Valenti?” Michael leans out of the truck, leering, tipping his cowboy hat as he puts the gearshift in park. “Sure hope you aren’t that clumsy on the football field next season.” 

Kyle’s nostrils flare like he wants to hit Michael, but Michael’s not interested in fighting today. He’s in a generous mood. Turns to look out the driver side window. 

“Where you headed, Manes?” 

On the other side of the truck Alex halts, deer in the headlights, suddenly aware that everyone’s attention is back on him, and blurts, “The Wild Pony. Maria and I have a Spanish project.” 

Never mind the fact that the Wild Pony is in the opposite direction of where Alex was walking, Michael just nods. “Perfect. I’m headed there too. Gotta see a man about a horse. Hop on in.” 

Alex doesn’t need telling twice. “See ya, fellas,” he mutters at Kyle, and climbs right into the passenger seat. Michael takes off before Alex has even buckled in, letting out one obnoxious _yeehaw_ as they careen away from the park. 

“You didn’t have to do that,” Alex shouts over the half-roar of the wind. 

“Shut up.” Michael shouts back, and cracks up at Alex’s shocked expression. 

He doesn’t take the usual left towards the Wild Pony and Alex doesn’t point it out. He seems relieved just to be in the car. 

When Michael wordlessly offers the aux cord, and Alex looks wary, again like Michael is offering him something flammable and dangerous. But then, maybe Alex has got more of a taste for trouble than Michael gives him credit for, if the black nail polish and Hot Topic getup are anything to go by. 

Michael was too preoccupied to notice when it happened, but sometime over summer Alex grew out his military regulation haircut, changed his style from khakis and tucked-in shirts to band tees and skinny jeans. His guarded strut became a little more of a petulant slouch. Hell, he even wore eyeliner. They still don’t interact much at school, him and Alex. But he knows _something’s_ changed. That Alex—for all his goodness and kindness and trustworthiness—somehow learned how to bite back when necessary. 

My Chemical Romance blasts over the speakers of Michael’s shitty truck and he bursts out laughing. 

“Welcome to the Black Parade?”

“Hey, don’t knock it,” Alex says, and then he starts to _bellow_ at the top of his lungs, banging out the opening drum solo like he wrote it himself. 

“Jesus Christ,” Michael laughs, but then he joins in for, “_We'll carry on, we'll carry on, _ _And though you're dead and gone, believe me, our memory will carry on.” _

Then MCR goes into Fall Out Boy, then Linkin Park and Michael swears this music grates on his ears on a very biological level, like he’s pretty sure it’s Alien Kryptonite, but Alex seems hellbent on drowning his demons in song, hand hanging out the window and, well, Michael isn’t going to say no to driving in the car with a pretty boy. 

They drive and they scream and Michael pounds his fist into the steering wheel, making the horn go off on beat, and when Alex laughs so hard he cries Michael gets these wild and bright ideas in his head, going off like fireworks. Max is so obnoxiously into his Tolstoy, his Dostoyevsky, his dark and dreary Russian authors, trying to make sense of the world. Michael always kind of preferred the beat poets. The Jack Kerouacs. He wonders if he were to keep driving, if Alex would let them. If they could drive until they ran out of road, and even longer after that. Would Alex leave this town with him? Would he put everything behind and not look back? On the road, just the two of them? Michael’s emancipated now. He could go anywhere. Be anyone. 

He wonders if Alex would want the same. But it’d be weird to ask, they hardly know each other, and Michael’s not about to make this weird. This isn’t about him, after all. 

“Where are we going, Guerin?” Alex finally asks, as Brendon Urie wails. 

“Best view in the city,” Michael answers, and peels off road where the sign points to the Foster Ranch. 

Foster Ranch is all flat land and open skies. It feels much smaller now to Michael, but maybe that’s just the change in perspective. His world suddenly bigger, hometown comparatively dwarfed. 

As bad as Michael wants to get the hell out of Roswell, he knows he’s gonna miss it. Say what you will about this town—from the wacky conspiracy theorist driven tourism to the underbelly of racism to the general small-town listlessness—there’s no beating a southwestern sky. Out here you can actually see the sky, the stars, the places beyond that. Michael feels like he’s lived all over the country by this point, from sea to shining sea, but nothing beats a Roswell sunset. 

He turns off the engine and climbs up onto the hood just as the sun starts to sink behind the mountains. Alex remains in the passenger seat, throwing Michael a doubtful look. 

“Did you bring me here to murder me?” 

“First of all, this is a terrible place to bury a body. Second of all,” Michael smirks inwardly. “If I wanted you dead I wouldn’t need to drag you out to some remote location to do it.”

“Yeah, because _that_ makes me feel better,” says Alex sarcastically, but he unbuckles his seatbelt, climbs up onto the hood alongside Michael. 

“I like it here,” Michael offers, and decides to leave it at that and let the sky do the talking.

Alex tucks his knees up beneath his chin, staring out at the desert, suddenly a lot smaller than he appears. 

“Why’d you really bring me here?” he asks after a beat, not looking at Michael. 

Michael knows, but he also doesn’t know. He doesn’t know why he pulled Alex into a bathroom last year and let him borrow his sister’s makeup. He couldn’t explain it if there was a gun to his head. It’s not like Alex is out here projecting Poor Defenseless Creature energy, but the thing is—Michael has _been_ the poor defenseless creature, over and over. He could say it was just that, just the idea that he’d be a dick if he saw someone being hurt and didn’t do anything about it. But the truth was Michael has seen a lot of people hurting, all around him, all the time. Humans are open wounds. Apart from Max and Iz, it never seemed to matter. He’d never wanted to _do_ anything about it until here and now. 

So, yeah. Definitely not answering that question. 

“Look, do you want me to take you back to your BFF Kyle Valenti? Because I can do that.” 

“No,” says Alex quietly, then, “I lied about having a Spanish project.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t need rescuing.” 

“I know.”

“Also, if you change your mind on murdering me, please wait until after the sun goes down.” 

“And why would I be so courteous?”

“Dunno.” Alex casts him a side glance, eyes glittering. “You’re kind of a gentleman.”

Michael wordlessly squawks. 

“Admit it. You have a hero complex.” 

Michael throws a half-hearted elbow towards his side. “I do not.”

“You kind of do.”

“Do _not_.”

He dodges Michael’s playful jabs to his sides, squirming. “Do you also rescue helpless kittens out of trees? Help little old ladies cross the street? God, what will the _town _think when they find out resident bad boy Michael Guerin is actually a certified Boy Scout?” 

Michael rolls his eyes. “Oh, fuck off.” 

“Kiss your mother with that mouth?”

“Kiss a lot of people,” Michael grins, and he’s probably imagining the sunset in Alex’s cheeks, rosy pink. 

Alex hops down from the hood to grab his backpack, and returns a second later with his cinderblock of an iPod and a bag of Skittles. They stretch the earbuds between them and spread the Skittles out on the hood. Michael snags all the purple ones, and probably imagines the strange look Alex gives him. They sit on Michael’s hood and listen to music for what feels like hours as the sun goes down, long after the last Skittle is gone (a lemon one, Alex holding it in his mouth like he’s savoring the taste). Alex has a ninety-nine percent shit music taste but every now and then he’ll play something acoustic and softer that makes something in Michael’s lungs ache, almost like he’s drowning, trying to hold his breath. 

“You’re in a good mood,” Alex observes. “I’ve never seen you so un-broody.”

Michael stretches his arms out. “As of now, you’re looking at an emancipated minor.”

Alex breaks out into a grin. He looks genuinely happy. “That’s great, Guerin. Congrats.” 

“What about you? You got an escape plan hatched yet?” 

“Ah.” Alex shrugs, looking off into the distance, the purple mountains with the blue shadows. “Gonna get my diploma first but then, who knows? I want to go to the city, I think. Hit the music scene. Meet more people like me.” 

People like Alex. Michael’s about eighty-seven percent sure Alex doesn’t mean musicians, but it feels rude to ask for clarification. 

“Cool,” he says instead, eloquent as always. “That’s cool.”

Alex raises an inquisitive eyebrow. “Is it?” 

Michael looks at him, briefly considers exposing the hundreds of Google searches he did to get to this point. _That’s cool_, like that surmises the strange heart-thump feeling of looking up the Kinsey Scale test in the dead of night on his foster parents’ computer. Of finding a definition for the way his body sometimes reacts. To girls. To boys. To people who aren’t either. He’s sixteen and survival is the only priority right now but underneath it all Michael’s aware that he’s a whole other species entirely, and he doesn’t know where he came from or what he’s made of so he’s pretty sure that whatever people he finds hot aren’t going to fit the rigid rules of human society. At least not the ones drilled into his head growing up. 

So little of Michael feels like it fits in the world, but finding the word “bisexual” helped bring him just a bit closer to not-so-alone. 

So, yeah. It’s cool. But Michael doesn’t know how to formulate a better response because him and Alex don’t really talk and he’s worried of fucking up this peace somehow, so he wrinkles his nose at the next song from Alex’s iPod and forces him to change it. 

They linger after dusk, dragging it out, when Alex breathes in, sucking the night air and holding it in his lungs like it’s a plume of smoke. Then he exhales, and asks Michael to take him home. 

“Sure thing, Manes,” says Michael, and hops off the truck, offering Alex a hand to get down. It’s cold now, desert nights always have this knack for being fucking freezing no matter how blistering hot the day is. But Alex’s hand is warm when he takes it. 

Alex continues playing music on the drive back, not saying much of anything except to give directions, but Michael can see the tension seeping back into him with every mile they close between here and home. 

Finally, he breaks the silence. “Guerin, could you, uh, do you mind dropping me off the next street over? I can walk.” 

Right. Being seen with Michael Guerin is probably the last thing Alex needs his dad knowing about. Michael just nods, feels stupid for even considering taking it personally. 

They don’t say anything else until Michael pulls over on Placita Del Arturo, lets the car idle as Alex gets out. 

He leans in through the window, drums his fingers against the leather. “Thanks for the ride.” 

“Don’t mention it.” 

Alex looks over his shoulder, at a house in the distance, then back at Michael. Like he wants to say something more. “Well, I’ll be seeing you.” 

And he’s right. They will. The following week at the Crashdown for Liz Ortecho’s first serving shift, where a moon-eyed Max wrangles everyone together to order milkshakes and tip fifty percent. Alex sits right across from Michael in the booth and spends the whole night arguing with Maria over Who In Harry Potter Is The Gayest. He doesn’t talk to Michael, and that’s fine. It makes sense that a sudden familiarity between them would raise questions from their friends, questions that even Michael wouldn’t really want to answer. So they don’t talk to each other, and Michael tries and tries not to feel stung. 

It doesn’t make sense to make new friends anyway. Michael’s going to leave, afterall. Michael’s going places. Michael’s got a future and he’s not letting anything get in his way. 

Still, he goes over to the jukebox and puts Welcome to the Black Parade on blast, watches from across the restaurant as Alex Manes bites down a smile. 

***

3\. 

“Guerin, I needed another keg of the Blue Moon five minutes ago. Quit sampling the merchandise and get up here!” 

“Do you just assume I’m a functioning alcoholic by day, DeLuca?” Michael exits the backroom, keg over his shoulder. “After all this time we’ve spent getting to know each other?”

“Am I wrong, though?” she lifts the keg with off him with one arm, practiced, strong. Kinda hot. 

“Isobel called,” he answers, and doesn’t miss when Maria wrinkles her nose. “What, I thought you two made up.” 

“Just because we’re on the same side and I’m dating her brother doesn’t mean we’re suddenly besties.” Maria shrugs. “I don’t hate her, I just. It’ll take some time.”

It’s maybe the one thing Michael doesn’t quite get about his sister or Maria. The strange crackling energy between them. They seemed to live to pull at each other’s pigtails, even though it’s been a decade since high school and they’ve definitely cleared the air between them, or, mostly have. 

Maria finishes tapping the keg and wipes her hands on a towel. “Speaking of, what time is it?” 

Michael checks his phone. “Uh, half past five?” 

“Damn.” Maria slings the towel over her shoulder. “I was supposed to go run up and check on Alex at the cabin.”

“Alex?”

“Yeah, you know him? About your height. Kinda cute. Currently the huge elephant in the room.” 

Say what you will about Maria, she doesn’t beat around the bush. “What’s wrong with him?” 

“He’s sick.” The corners of Maria’s mouth pull down. “You didn’t know?” 

“Uh.” Michael scratches at the back of his neck. “It’s been a minute. I’ve been busy, and we haven’t exactly—”

Hung out. Or talked, period, since about a month ago when Alex came to the junkyard to work things out between them and Michael didn’t show because he was here, at the Wild Pony. With Maria. 

He’d meant to talk to Alex. Meant to break it gently to him and clear the air and maybe start over again. And then suddenly it was a few days later and Maria was sliding into a booth at the Crashdown for late-night pancakes and slipping her hand into Michael’s for a brief squeeze. And then it was Alex, looking at their locked hands, or maybe just looking at Michael’s healed hand, or maybe looking at both, expression perfectly blank, all the way through pancakes and paying the bill and walking out the door. 

That was a month ago. And save from showing up with the rest of the gang to talk logistics and plans, Michael hasn’t really spoken one on one with him since. This is something he figured would also be happening to Maria—the radio silence. Evidently he was wrong. 

Maria fixes him with a look. “Guerin, are you a grown ass man or are you a grown ass man?” 

“Technically speaking, I’m an alien.”

“Guerin.”

“It’s not _my_ fault,” says Michael childishly. “He’s avoiding me.”

“Really?” Maria frowns. “That doesn’t sound like him.” 

“How sick is he?” 

“I don’t know, had a fever this morning last I heard. We were supposed to hang out but he texted me saying he was going back to bed. I told him I’d check up on him before happy hour ended but,” she gestures to the crowded bar, “I’m busy. And Liz would normally go but she’s...she’s at your sister’s place today.”

Ah, right. The recently resurrected Ortecho, currently lying low at Izzy’s house until they figure out a plan to, you know, tell the whole world she’s not actually dead. 

“I’ll take care of him,” says Michael, before he’s even truly registering the words. “You stay, I’ll go.” 

Maria kinks her eyebrow at him. “Whiskey is _not_ medicine, just so we’re clear.”

“Hardy har har.” Like he’s not already making a mental grocery list. “I know how to take care of a sick person.” 

“Whatever you say, Guerin,” she teases, eyes sparkling. She’s got a backwards baseball cap on her head and Michael’s flannel tied around her waist; she must have stolen it off the floor of his trailer this morning.

“You look pretty,” he says, unthinking, and she whips the towel off her shoulder to smack him with it. 

“I can’t believe you’re flirting with me when our friend is _ill_. Have you no decency?”

“Can’t I multi-task?” he asks, leaning in to nuzzle at her cheek. 

“Go,” Maria says, and shoves him playfully, “_Go_. I can’t live with my best friend dying on my conscience. Get out of here.” 

“Fine,” he sighs, but steals a kiss before he dashes out the door. 

The grocery trip takes him only fifteen minutes. He knows what he needs and just how much. 

He wouldn’t have known about the cabin if several of their many oddball meetings hadn’t been there. But he still gets lost, misses the dirt road turn and doubles back more than once, pulling up to a cabin that looks familiar only because he recognizes Alex’s car out front. 

There’s no response when he knocks on the door. Not that Michael would usually bother with something like that, but things have been weird with Alex ever since Michael more or less stood him up. He knocks again, a little louder. No answer. 

Michael unlocks the door gently, eases it open and comes face to face with the barrel of a gun. 

“Jesus.” Michael holds his hands up, groceries dropped at his feet. “Don’t shoot.”

“What the fuck are you doing here, Guerin?” Alex uncocks the rifle, looking irritated. “And why the hell are you breaking in?”

“Maria told me to come by and check on you.” 

“And she couldn’t give you her key?” 

“Didn’t ask.” Michael lifts up the grocery bag in explanation. “I come in peace.” 

Alex rolls his eyes. “I should have gone with the original defense plan.”

“Oh yeah? And what was that?”

“Hitting you over the head with my crutch,” Alex responds, then retreats back inside, which Michael assumes is permission to enter.

The place is a disaster zone. Turns out Alex “I Make My Bed Every Morning At 0700 Hours” Manes does not do well with being sick. The coffee table is covered in tissues and half drunk mugs of tea. The air is stale—he obviously was trying to keep out the cold. Alex’s own appearance seems to match, he has a nose that’s red and looks like he hasn’t showered in several days. It’s the least put together Michael has seen him since high school. 

“You look fucking terrible.” 

“I feel perfectly fine,” says Alex, before breaking off into a sharp coughing fit that has him doubling over, leaning on his crutch. 

“Right. My mistake. You’re fit as a fiddle.” Michael brushes past Alex into the kitchen. “But on the off chance that you’re not, can you please do me a solid and go take a hot shower?”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Yes, yes, I know, you’re a war hero, king of survival, but you also stink, and you’re probably dehydrated and malnourished. So, take these,” he pushes a double dose of Advil into Alex’s hand. “Go shower and then take a nap. I’ll wake you when soup’s ready.” 

“Soup? What soup?”

“The soup I’m making.” 

“I didn’t ask for soup.” 

“That’s nice.” 

Alex looks like he really, _really_ wants to argue, but he’s either too tired or has realized that Michael’s just not gonna budge, because he slumps and saunters off towards the bedroom. 

Michael waits until he hears the shower start to run, and then he gets to work. He’s been practicing, after all. 

For the chopping he uses his hands—he’s not so great with precision as he would hope. Locks are easy, cutting evenly sliced bits of carrot and celery is a whole other beast. But the rest he does without his hands. Pouring the broth, adding the seasoning, turning on the stove. By the time the soup is simmering he’s got a low grade headache and accidentally spilled garlic powder on the counter, but there’s only the teeniest drop of blood from his nose, which means it’s progress. 

As it turns out, the world of living extraterrestrials with powers is a lot wider than Michael initially thought. 

It started with Rosa Ortecho. Because _someone’s_ dumbass brother had to go and be the hero, _again. _The effort to bring Rosa back had nearly nearly cost Max his life. He’d been dead for seven minutes and forty two seconds. Either Liz Ortecho gave him true love’s kiss of life or she really is a scientific genius. It was touch and go, but they got Max back. And that was what mattered. 

Of course, that's when all hell broke loose. 

Rosa Ortecho was alive, but that wasn’t exactly something they could celebrate, let alone let the rest of the world in on. It was a fucking miracle, but it was a miracle that could spell disaster, and quick. The second Rosa Ortecho went back on the grid, the Feds would be swarming their town. Initially Liz had called only Michael and Isobel with the news. But she’d needed a doctor to check Rosa’s vitals, and so Kyle Valenti got involved. Followed by Alex, who could keep an eye on the web and the government and see if anyone had spotted Rosa, could figure out how tightly their secret had to be kept. And then lastly, Maria, who was bound to realize sooner or later that all her friends were hanging out without her and figure it out on her own. She took it in stride, the whole “aliens are real” thing. Rosa’s reappearance was a little harder to swallow, but Maria got over her shock, and she set aside her concerns to focus on the task at hand: keeping Rosa safe. 

They’d met up later that week, the first week, crowded into Max’s living room and going over their options. Even if they decided to fake a paper trail and create a cover story that Rosa ran away, there’s still no way to explain the autopsy, the body, the fact that she hasn’t aged a day in ten years. She looks younger than Liz now. And even _if_ they came up with a plausible cover story, the entire town thinks she’s been dead for ten years. As if people needed more of a reason to target the Ortecho family, a girl back from beyond the grave would surely be the final nail in the coffin. 

So they decided. Keep Rosa secret, keep the Ortechos safe. They took shifts and passed her around like a kid going through a divorce. It was hard, especially on Liz. She was euphoric to have her sister back, but Max had mentioned that it was killing her not to tell their dad, to let him see with his own two eyes. But she knew the risk. They all did. If people found out, she’d likely never see her sister again, for real this time. 

Knowing what they knew about Caulfield, combined with the intel Alex was able to cull from his father, people were still looking for aliens. Still conducting experiments. Until they knew exactly how much of a force they were up against, it just wasn’t worth the risk to expose her. Rosa may not be an alien, but spending ten years in a pod was sure to make her a person of interest just the same. 

Now, they’re sort of a semi-functioning band of misfits, alien and human alike. They are not a “team,” no matter how much Valenti uses the word, bouncing into their designated meetup place—it varies, the time and place, sometimes they’re at the Wild Pony in early afternoon while Maria does inventory, other times they’re at the hospital lab, and Liz is staring at a microscope as she threatens Michael not to fuck with her takeout order because they’re about to be up all night working and she _better_ get her extra hot sauce. Valenti always enters, clapping his hands together and saying, “Good morning, team,” and Michael thinks it’s the high school quarterback part of him that’s been lying dormant for years but he swears if Kyle gets any ideas about giving them an official team name, he’ll walk, he totally will. 

The point is, they’re not a team. They’re a group of mixed skills that consists of: aliens with supernatural abilities, a doctor, a scientist, a codebreaker and the town’s psychic slash gossip queen, who knows everyone and everything because she owns the one bar in town where everyone goes, and she’s read their palms. Then there’s Rosa, who sticks close to Liz and doesn’t say much, but Michael knows she’s listening, picking things up quickly. That her presence, while shaky and occasionally erratic, shimmers just as brightly as her younger sister’s. 

At least, that’s what Maria tells him. She’s the one with the ability to see auras after all. 

They don’t do a whole lot, but they do what they can. When Kyle reveals that he’s been making off-the-clock doctor’s visits to the undocumented immigrants who live in town, that gets the gears in everyone’s heads turning. They don’t really _have_ to sit still and wait for the next alien serial killer or secret government operation to come knocking on their door. In the meantime, they can help other people and they can work on their skills. 

Every now and then Iz can drop her influence when needed at the border checkpoints, at town council meetings where some asshole or another is trying to get some racist policy passed. Michael can fuck with ICE agents’ cars when they’re rolling through. Max can keep a lid on whatever information goes to the police, practice his healing abilities when Kyle needs extra help. And when the time comes, they’ll be ready. 

Michael looks at the spilled garlic powder with a sigh and prays that it’s later rather than sooner. 

He stirs the pot every few minutes as his mind wanders into the other room, sweeping the tissues into a trash bag, cracking open the windows for a cool breeze, starting a load of laundry and stripping the sheets from the bed. By the time Alex is turning off the shower, the cabin is mostly clean, and Michael’s got a decent but not catastrophic nosebleed, and feels pretty damn happy with himself. His stamina has gotten better. 

Michael walks into the living room to let Alex know the soup will be ready soon and a small pang goes off in his chest. Alex is curled on his side, facing the back of the couch, knees tucked to his chest in a hairpin curve, the kind of curve Michael would take going 90 miles per hour in his truck. His hair is tufty but dry and he’s wearing plaid pajama pants and a Panic! at the Disco sweater that’s three sizes too large. 

He’s sleeping like the dead. 

The soup’s simmering on low heat and Alex is out for the time being. Michael sends a quick text to Maria (_here with him, gave him some meds, taking a nap_) and pokes around. There’s a stack of books sitting on the coffee table, a dog-eared book on coding, a Rosetta Stone for Spanish, and beneath that, a book on dead languages. Michael flips through them all, curious, wondering what sort of rabbit holes Alex often finds himself in, what the indecipherable pencil scrawl in the margins means, how he thinks, what he thinks about. 

It’s odd; they’ve been to hell and back together, but Michael can’t even tell if the handwriting in these books belong to Alex or someone else entirely. 

Some time later there’s movement on the couch. He looks up to find Alex blinking blearily at him. 

“Hey,” Michael slides off the ottoman and crouches next to him. “How are you feeling?” 

“Like shit,” Alex croaks. “But slightly less like shit than before.” 

“You were out for a few hours.” Before he can think to control the impulse, Michael presses his hand to Alex’s forehead. Hot and dry just like he’d expected. Alex shivers beneath the touch. “Looks like your fever is still going. Let’s get you some more Tylenol and some soup.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Bullshit. I know you can’t cook, literally everyone has roasted you in the groupchat for it on multiple occasions, so don’t even bother.”

Michael goes to the kitchen and Alex calls after him, “I can cook.” 

“Sure, okay, maybe you can make things that won’t kill you, but none of them taste good. It’s fine, nobody’s perfect, I accept you for who you are.” Michael scoops what he needs into a heaping bowl and marches back into the living room, where Alex is glaring stubbornly at him. “I swear to god, Manes, if you don’t let me _help you.._.”

“Didn’t ask for help,” Alex grouses. 

“Right, right.” Michael rolls his eyes. “You could be dying and you still wouldn’t ask, stubborn shit. You have honor, you have integrity, you can’t bear to let others see you suffer, I _get it_. Just let me fucking feed you, asshole, and I’ll leave you alone.”

“I can feed myself,” says Alex, taking the bowl from Michael’s hands. He takes a steaming bite, sucking in air to cool the hot soup, and his eyes go huge. “This is...good?” 

“Don’t sound so shocked.”

Alex takes another dainty sip, and then he’s just sort of eagerly drinking the broth down, scraping the bottom of the bowl for the vegetables and bits of chicken noodle, suddenly ravenous. 

“I don’t know whether to be insulted or honored at this juncture,” Michael says, grabbing himself a bowl as well. 

“Where’d you even learn to make this? I thought your sibs didn’t get sick.”

“They don’t,” says Michael, taking a beat to blow on a spoonful of broth. “But Max and Iz are not my only siblings.”

A pause in Alex’s movements as Michael’s words hover in the air. 

“Want to talk about it?” asks Alex.

Michael shifts. “Not much to say.”

Not true. Ask Michael if he wants to talk most days, and the answer is usually no. Sometimes his past feels like this cavernous sinkhole, something he can only make vague jokes about, but not something he can actually discuss. Sometimes he worries that if he starts talking about his childhood he’ll never stop. 

(“You ever think about trying therapy?” Liz asks him one night, halfway through synthesizing another sample batch of antidote together. At Michael’s expression, she snorts and goes, “Yeah, me neither.”)

The one thing that’s kind of weird about Michael’s upbringing is that while he was very much alone by way of having Iz and Max with him, he wasn’t truly alone. There weren’t always other kids in the families he got foisted upon. But there were some. He’s never really talked about that with anyone before. 

“Well, I’d like to hear about them,” says Alex, and goes to refill his bowl of soup. “If you’re up for it.”

So Michael tells Alex about his other siblings. 

He talks about little Ellie in Albuquerque, so tiny she could hide in the smallest crevices and always win at hide-and-seek. About the week she contracted strep throat, and the parents, the meth-heads, didn’t believe she was really sick. Michael was twelve, and used his powers to shatter a pharmacy window, sneak the proper antibiotics while no one was looking. He made sure she took every dose until she was better and they were all gone. 

Then there was Shayla in Santa Fe, who’d get migraines that would keep her in bed for days. Michael would skip school just to sit with her, read her books while she lay still with a cold compress on her head. She liked _Charlotte’s Web_ the best. 

Then there was Eddie—adopted from China, selected to be the perfect model student to secure his white adoptive parents’ future until he’d contracted meningitis as a toddler and lost his hearing in both ears. His adoptive parents decided that Eddie would be “better” than the other deaf kids. They refused to learn ASL to communicate with him, forcing Eddie to read lips in English before he could learn sign language. Michael, on a trial foster period with potential for adoption with the family, spent sleepless nights pouring over ASL books from the school library until he’d developed a basic fluency. Him and Eddie could have secret conversations at the dinner table under the parents’ furious noses. Michael was only there for a couple weeks after that. 

He talks about the countless others in group homes. Runny noses, high fevers, upset stomachs that always came around adoption day. Doesn’t always remember names but remembers the faces, their wide eyes and skinny elbows, how he always let the little ones call him _Mikey_, a nickname he loathed, and never once asked them to stop. 

Alex listens, finishes his soup, makes them both tea, and Michael tells stories until his voice goes hoarse. Until Alex’s eyelids are droopy and he’s curled under the blanket and the sky outside is pitch black, cricket symphony in the night. In the quiet, it’s like they’re the only two people in the world. 

Michael finishes, and breathes as if someone had been sitting on his chest and only just gotten up. 

“Do you feel better?” he asks quietly.

“Much,” says Alex, breaking off to yawn. “I think if I sleep through the night I should be alright.”

“How’d you even get sick? You were fine last week.”

“Well, that’s what happens when you’re a human being who stays up for thirty-six hours straight to hack a government base for medical files. I can’t just drink some nail polish remover and be done with it, Guerin. Some of us are fallible.” He sounds almost bitter when he says it. 

“Leg bothering you?”

“It’s fine.” 

“Do you want me to stay?”

Alex waves him off. “You shouldn’t have come all the way out here in the first place.” 

Michael looks sidelong at him. “What else are friends for?” 

Alex’s eyes snap open, suddenly alert. Cautious. “Is that what we are?”

Michael shrugs, picking at a hangnail, feigning nonchalance. “It was your idea. I mean, it’s what I want. But you’ve been avoiding me, so it was kinda hard to tell you that.”

“I.” Alex opens his mouth to argue, but stops. “I didn’t know you wanted that. When you didn’t show that day at the junkyard, I thought—and then I found out about you and Maria and I just. I don’t know.” 

“What, you thought that just because we’re not together that I’m going to pretend you don’t exist?” 

Alex curls a little tighter on the couch, mumbling into the blanket. “I don’t know.” 

“Well, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Look.” Michael scrubs a hand through his hair. Usually around Alex he feels young. And stupid. And naive. But right now he just feels like he’s twenty seven. Like he’s trying to own up to his shit. 

“High school was...insane. Everything that happened between us back then—it all happened so fast. I don’t know about you, but I was messed up back then. I still am, in some ways. Maybe we would have figured it out on our own, but then Rosa died and you left and everything since then has been this bizarro mix of horrendous and painful and traumatic. And when you came back, I realized that I don’t know a single thing about you beyond the most fucked up thing about you. And I want to know you Alex, really know you. You’re not just the fuck for old times’ sake, okay? You’re more than that.”

He wants to go further. Wants to say, _what you said in Caulfield, about family, you are too, you’re my family too_, but he feels like he’s lost the chance to say that, to lay that claim. Things are different now, and that’s not bad. But it is different. 

And maybe this would be easier if there weren’t ten years of history staring at them. Maybe if Michael weren’t seeing someone. But he refuses to do any wishful thinking in that department. 

Michael likes Maria. There’s no “but” to that statement. He likes the smell of her hair and the way she can make friends with just about everyone who walks through the bar while managing to take no shit. He likes the way her voice gets soft when she talks to her mom on the phone and he likes the way she always insults him right before she kisses him. She’s beautiful and a hundred times better than him and she is not a consolation prize for the way things didn’t work out with Alex. She’s a whole person, a wonderful person. 

He doesn’t think it’s forever love for either of them, but it is good. It’s being with someone who doesn’t share the exact same amount of baggage has him, and being kind of relieved for it. 

Over on the couch, it looks like the fever is breaking, maybe. Alex’s eyes are shining, and he’s flushed all over, looking at Michael’s hand once ruined, now healed. 

“Okay,” he says in a small voice. “Friends is good.” 

“Thank god,” Michael replies. “Maria would have threatened intervention if we didn’t start talking again.” 

“I’ve gotta stop hanging around a psychic.”

“Your current company is a dude from outer space who can throw shit with his mind, and it’s the psychic you gotta ditch? Not the aliens or the girl who’s been dead for ten years?”

“She’s too smart for her own good. Gotta cut her loose.” 

“DeLuca will be onto us before we can even touch her. She’s wiley like that.” 

“You would know,” Alex quips, and Michael finds himself blushing, ducking his head despite himself. This whole scenario is so weird, getting teased about the girl he’s dating by the guy who was most of his firsts and all of his young heartbreak at age seventeen. It’s really fucking weird. 

But then, life in Roswell has been a lot of weird as of late. If Alex can roll with it, well, so can he. 

Alex is doing that thing again, where he’s looking at Michael like he’s got the cypher for every puzzle out there to solve. Like he’s so close to figuring it out. 

“You’re right,” he says. “We can be friends. We should be friends. If only so I can trick you into giving me the recipe for that soup.” 

“Not on your life, Manes. That’s a family secret. I’d tell you but I’d have to kill you.” 

“Well,” Alex says, mouth tilting slyly. “If someone’s going to destroy me it might as well be you.” 

Michael laughs, and Alex’s eyes crinkle when he smiles and it’s weird and it’s new and it’s just enough to hope that they’re really, truly going to be okay. 

*** 

4.

When Maria DeLuca dumps his ass two months later, she’s somehow the only person in the world who could make a breakup _not_ feel like the worst thing that’s ever happened to him. 

“I could give you any cliche you choose,” she offers, wiping down the counter.It’s a weeknight at the bar, and the place is empty minus Racist Hank and a few of the other locals. “Take your pick. You want ‘It’s not you, it’s me’? Or how about ‘I have to learn to love myself before I can love someone else.’ Ooh, or maybe, ‘I just need some space.’ Should I cry? I feel like I should shed at least a tear for you. Let me get the lime juice.”

“Nah, leave the sap for Max and Liz,” says Michael. “Cliches were never our style.” 

“Yeah.” She looks up, smiling gently at him over the bar. “I guess not.” 

Maria pours them both a shot of top-shelf tequila and tells him it’s on the house. They toast, to him, to her, to them, to good sex and bad hangovers, to Roswell New Fucking Mexico.

They polish off half the bottle, laughing and leaning in to one another. And it’s weird, but also not weird at all, how he feels just as content to do this with her as he was to be with her. How it’s almost better, to love and know her in this particular way. 

“You’re too good for me,” he says, pressing a kiss to her cheek. 

“Oh I know.” She laughs, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “It’s time for me to move on up in the world. You think I should give that Detective Cameron a call?” 

“To—what, bond over your broken hearts via the Evans-Guerin family?”

“Mm, something like that,” Maria hums, takes one sly look at Michael’s dumbfounded expression and bursts out laughing. “What, you thought you were the only bisexual in this town?” 

There are some days where Michael thinks he’ll never stop being surprised by humans. Usually, that’s a bad thing, a shitty thing, a hoard-this-for-ten-years-as-a-reminder-to-never-forget-how-badly-you-were-treated thing. But the more time he spends around these people, these friends, their patchwork quilt of a family, aliens and humans alike, the more Michael is surprised every day. The more he’s glad for it. 

She cups his cheek, tipsy and glowing, brushes their noses together. “Love you. Now get out of my bar before I have the bouncer throw you out.”

Michael stumbles out into the night air, a little bit drunk and only feeling sorry for himself because he’s not at all surprised. 

It’s sort of instinct by now, to text Alex. _hey, are you awake? _Maybe not the best idea to text your ex at midnight, but he can’t think of anyone else in the world he’d want to talk to. Maybe it’s the alcohol, having his guard down, feeling soft in ways he doesn’t have a name for, but he wants to see Alex. Because somehow Alex went from being the person he never talks to the person he talks to the most outside his siblings, and that’s important. That means something, and Michael is drunk and he just got dumped and for some odd reason right now he thinks it’s really really important that Alex know. 

(Alex, of the dry humor and quiet wit. Alex, of the endless puns about his leg that are impossible not to laugh at. Alex, who will stay up three nights in a row chasing a shadow on the dark web because he thinks it could help someone in the group. Alex of the steady heart and steadier hands who can’t cook a piece of toast to save his life but grounds them, grounds all of them. Alex, who meditates with Iz when she’s rigid and distant, set off by something that she won’t talk about. Alex, who lets Rosa stay in the bunker basement of his cabin and lets her paint the walls any color, any design. Alex, who has the capacity in him to forgive anyone who’s willing to change, or at least try, because he is good, and he recognizes good, and it’s drawn to him like a moth to light.)

But Alex doesn’t respond, either asleep or phone dead while he buries himself in god knows what internet wormhole, so Michael waits on the curb and sobers up just enough to get him the drive back to his trailer. He’ll pick up coffee and donuts in the morning and make his way out to Alex’s cabin. He’ll even get the pink one, which is Alex’s favorite, and he can’t for the life of him tell why. And Alex will be working because Alex is _always_ working but maybe he can convince him to take a break. They’ve been working their way through a rewatch of the Star Wars movies and Alex has the strangest soft spot for Han Solo. 

Michael crashes onto his bed and lets the ceiling spin and reorient itself, and tries not to think too hard about how strangely excited he is for the morning to come. 

_don’t work yourself too hard soldier. c u tmrw _he texts, right before he passes out. 

-

Alex isn’t at the cabin. 

Michael knocks for a bit, but he doesn’t see Alex’s car, which means he’s either at physical therapy or maybe at the Crashdown, possibly grabbing food before they all meet up. Michael texts, then double texts, then calls, but it goes directly to voicemail, and they’re so far out in the boonies that he can’t tell if it’s bad cell reception or Alex’s phone being dead. 

He heads to Isobel’s place, expecting Alex to turn around from the couch already settled in, when he gets there. But it’s only Liz. 

“Hey.” She turns the tv off. “I was just thinking about calling you. I had an idea for our pod experiment. Are you up for some science shenanigans tonight?”

“Yeah sure,” Michael says, not really listening. “Have you seen Alex today?”

Liz cocks her head, the tiniest of creases on her forehead. “I just got off a shift at the Crashdown and he wasn’t there. I can text my dad and see if he was there last night when he closed. Why, what’s up?” 

“It’s nothing.” It’s probably nothing. Alex was his own person, Michael very often didn’t know where he was throughout the day. He’s probably off with one of the others. The prickling on the back of his neck, goosebumps on his arms, it’s just paranoia. It’s nothing to freak out over. 

He sits on Isobel’s couch, insides pulling tighter by the second as Iz walks out of the bathroom from checking her makeup and Max walks through the front door, talking to Valenti. Then Rosa, who slumps in from upstairs with a mug of tea and takes her seat in the corner nook of the room, closest to the door. By the time Maria joins them and Liz pulls out her notebook for note taking, Michael’s hands are clenched so tightly he could break something. 

“Where’s Alex?” Maria asks, taking the words right out of his mouth. “He’s usually on time for everything.”

“He’s not at his cabin,” says Michael. “I was just there. And I haven’t been able to call or text him. Phone just goes to voicemail. Has anyone seen him?” 

A chorus of overlapping voices: 

“I saw him just yesterday.”

“No, no, we saw him Saturday, at Ranchero night.” 

“Weren’t you supposed to go hiking with him?”

“Yeah, but he never texted to confirm, so I figured he got busy.” 

Dread blooms in Michael’s gut like internal bleeding, as he watches the same feeling spill over all their faces. 

“Okay.” Michael breathes. “When was the last time any of you _spoke_ with Alex?” 

Everyone immediately takes out their phones. He was at Ranchero night on Saturday, helping Maria bartend. That was four days ago. He sent a text on Sunday to Max, liked an alien meme that Kyle put in the groupchat early Monday morning. And then—nothing. No calls. No texts. 

“He’s not at the cabin? You’re sure?”

“No. I checked. Car’s gone.”

“I’ll put out an APB, see if it was stolen.”

“Alex would have called that in in a heartbeat.”

“Unless Alex was stolen along with it.” 

Michael’s head is starting to hurt, racing thoughts pressing against the inside of his skull. “You’re telling me that we have no idea where he is.” 

“I might,” says Rosa, her voice almost hoarse. “I saw him on Sunday, for AA. Well, I was at AA. He was at the VA meeting across the hall. We carpool together, so no one from Roswell recognizes us. He mentioned he was following a lead on something over in Southern Arizona. He thought he’d found alien activity.”

“And you didn’t think to mention it sooner?” 

“He asked me not to.” Rosa tightens her arms around herself. “Not the alien thing. I mean, he said he didn’t want anyone to know he went to VA. But he also said the lead was probably nothing, a local legend that had a ninety-nine percent chance of being a stupid conspiracy. He said he’d be back within a day.”

But he wasn’t. Arizona wasn’t exactly a hop skip and a jump, even if Alex had hauled ass. It’s Wednesday. Even if he’d stayed overnight, he’d be back by now. He’d be back. 

All at once, they’re moving. Max is on his police walkie calling in to the station and Iz is dialing town council numbers and Kyle is headed for the hospital to see if there are any John Does turned up in the ICU. They’re a flurry of motion and fear and concern around him. Michael sits very still, staring down at his hand. He thinks he’s furious—furious that Alex would be stupid enough to go after a lead of any sort on his own. He thinks he’s angry, but right now he just feels sort of numb with fear. 

Liz puts her hand over his. “We’ll find him. He’s tough. If something happened to him, he’ll survive until we get to him.”

“How could he be so stupid. He should have brought one of us. I am going to _kill him_.” 

“He’s probably fine,” she soothes, the voice of a person who’s lived the worst case scenario and came out on the other side. “I’m sure his car broke down and his phone died. He’s probably just at a hotel waiting for Triple A.” 

She’s wrong, but Michael supposes it’s the thought that counts.

Authorities find Alex’s car abandoned on the side of the road several miles outside of Gila Bend, Arizona. No signs of a struggle or a break-in, just Alex’s crutch sitting in the passenger seat. 

From what limited information they can gather thanks to the internet, Gila Bend is just another town in the Southwest where nothing happens, and therefore the alien conspiracy theorists flock to it. 

They decide as a group that it’s too risky for all of them to leave together. If something happens and the police are involved, or worse, the government, Liz can’t draw attention to her dad. The others are probably best stationed back home. Isobel grabs her jeep and together the three of them take off around midday. It’s a nine-hour drive, they’ll be there by morning. 

Once they get to town, it only takes a few hours of sweet-talking the locals—the town boasts a population of under 2,000, claiming to have more solar panels than people—to track down the lead. A cave, few miles off in the Sonoran Desert. A cave rumored to have been made by aliens. If you touch the wall, an ancient alien language glows. They ask around for Alex, check the local motel, but all they get is an old woman with leathery skin at the check-out desk, who smiles and says, _ah yes, the handsome soldier_, and tells them that Alex had stayed at the Space Age Motel on Sunday night and checked out first thing Monday morning, taking a hiking trail leaflet with him. 

He must have gone looking for the cave, they figure, which sends them driving out to the Sonoran Desert, like old times, when they used to pitch a tent in the dirt and call it an adventure, even though Roswell was only a few kilometers away. Max and Iz don’t say much, but he can see that they want to. Michael’s running on two gas station coffees and nothing else, despite Isobel’s best efforts, but considering all that he thinks he’s holding it together pretty well. But he can tell his siblings want to _talk_ about it; Max is doing the puppy eyes more than usual which means he’s quietly upset about something and Isobel is saying nothing, which means she’s really trying to reign it in. They don’t talk about Alex in the way that they talk about their other exes. He doesn’t think it’s so much a shame thing so much as it’s them not really knowing what to say about Alex, about Michael, about Alex and Michael. Join the freaking club. 

Turns out the cave is a dead end. Worse, a hoax of a dead end. Michael sets his palm on the wall and the cave lights up...with fiber optics. Max finds several generators in the back of the cave. From there they decide: okay, they can track down the people who bought the generators, because that’s likely what Alex would have tried to do. If he’s not with them, at the very least they might have an inkling as to where he is. 

By the time they’re at the general store, trying to figure out who’s buying them, the sun is going down and those coffees in Michael’s stomach have turned to pure acid and he doesn’t know what he’ll do if one of them says something like _it’s late, we should book a room for the night_, because he’s not doing _anything_ until he’s sure Alex is okay. 

Turns out that that list of people who’ve purchased generators recently is pretty short in a small town that’s largely run by solar panels. They’ve got a list of just five houses, all spread out over the town. 

“What exactly are we planning to do, knock on people’s doors and ask them if they’ve seen Alex?”

“You got a better plan?”

“They might not even know what we’re talking about.” 

“Look, whoever built that cave is obviously trying to cause trouble. Whether they just want attention or they’re trying to lure in conspiracy theorists, we should look alive.” 

They’re driving towards the center of town when Michael suddenly feels something, deep beneath his sternum, tingling at the back of his neck. He doesn’t know how to describe it. It’s not a whisper or a swell of sound but rather a pulse, synched with his, going off like a sonar. 

“Turn left.” 

Max yanks the steering wheel, and Isobel turns around. “What, what is it?”

“I don’t know,” he says, honest. “Just turn.” 

Max makes a sharp left, and his eyes widen. “There’s some hefty electrical activity beyond this neighborhood, up in the hills. I can feel it.” 

“You can _feel_ it?” Isobel asks. 

“I’ve been practicing. With Liz. Trying to see if I can draw on electricity from the air to use my powers, but it has to either be a storm or a powerplant. And you know, we kind of have to be careful that I don’t stop my own heart like I did with Rosa.”

“What the fuck,” Isobel whispers.

“Cool,” says Michael. 

They follow one road to another. Pavement becomes private dirt road as Gila Bend fades to a small blip of light in the flat black ocean of the desert. So tucked away it’s a miracle that this place even has an address, there’s not so much a road as their is enough dirt to drive between the saguaros that pepper the land. This house looks...old. Abandoned. Put up on cinder blocks to keep it stable with the slow creep of the hillside. It doesn’t look like anyone’s lived here in fifty years, but the tug in Michael’s sternum increases as they pull up and park the car. 

There are no lights on. No furniture in the house. Alex doesn’t see a for sale sign. 

“Should we just. Knock?” 

“We have no idea what we’re up against here. I say we don’t do that.”

“We can’t exactly break in, either.”

Max and Isobel start bickering and Michael just gets out, walks up to the front door, and rings the doorbell. 

No response. 

Max and Isobel get out of the car and jog over to him. “I don’t think anyone actually lives here.”

Michael rings the doorbell again. Nothing. 

“Michael,” says Max quietly. “The generators. They’re not in the house.”

Michael frowns. “What do you mean?”

“I mean their frequency isn’t up here.” Max kicks a toe at the earth. “It’s down _there_.” 

Isobel shrugs. “Tornado shelter?”

“In Arizona? That’s not a thing.”

“Look. Just. I’ll go, check it out. You stay and keep watch. If the family comes back, just pretend to be a lost married couple looking for the Airbnb you booked. If I’m not back in ten come get me.” 

“You don’t know who or what could be in there.”

“In this creaky shack? It’s probably some old lady who refuses to run off solar power and has the extra generators in an old basement. Alex is probably making her a cup of tea and reading her poetry because he reminds her of her soldier husband. It’s fine.” Michael squares his shoulders, ignoring the way Max and Isobel are looking at him. “He’s fine.” 

Then he flicks the lock open and steps inside. 

The house isn’t even finished. There are no carpets. Just solid concrete floors and...shelves? Rows and rows of shelves with canned goods, gas masks. There’s no chairs, no furniture, not a single picture frame or grandfather clock in sight. 

Then, in the back of the hallway, a door in the floor. A fucking steel enforced door, heavy metal, bolted into the concrete. 

Michael halts, heart hammering in his chest. He tells himself that Max and Isobel are right outside. That they’ll come at a moment’s notice. He raises his gun, forcing his breathing to steady, and walks forward. 

He lifts the door with his hands, groaning under the strain. Then he tucks his gun into his jeans and pulls out his cellphone. The light goes down ten feet, then stops, blackness below. 

Michael takes a deep breath like he’s plunging into water, and climbs down the ladder. There’s a subterranean hum the further down he moves, ten, maybe twenty feet. He can’t tell if this is underground or the house is just built so high up it seems like it. He can’t tell anymore. It’s dark. It’s so fucking dark. 

And then, suddenly, thankfully, his toe touches down on solid ground. He drops the rest of the distance from the ladder, rights himself. He doesn’t know where he is or who’s in there with him so he keeps his light off. There’s a light-source somewhere, because he can tell the room is pretty big. At least as large as the living room upstairs. 

Michael squints into the black, but all he can see is dark shapes along the walls. Stacks of crates, maybe. He waits for his eyes to adjust in the dark and when they do, his entire body goes cold while his stomach is hot, writhing with nausea.

Not crates. Cages. 

A room full of cages. 

There’s a door at the end of the room, Michael can hear sounds from beyond it—a radio, a TV. He doesn’t see any security cameras. God, what is this? A survival bunker? These aren’t thin cages for animals. The bars are thick, heavy steel. Made for large animals. Or maybe not animals at all. 

Something moves in the corner of his eye, a shadow drawing up inside one of the cages to the far right. Pale hands, with blood and dirt matted under the fingernails, grip the bars. 

“Guerin?”

Michael’s knees almost buckle. He stumbles blindly towards the cage, not caring how much noise he makes. 

“Alex.” His knees give out at last and hit sharply on the floor. He’s so relieved he could _choke_ on it. “Alex.”

“Fucking hell it’s good to see you.” Alex reaches for him, wraps grimy fingers around his wrists through the bars and holds him there. He smiles, and Michael’s heart punches through his chest. 

“Are you alright?” Michael tries to shift in the dim light, catch a better glimpse. There’s an ugly bleeding goose-egg of a bruise on Alex’s forehead. “You’re hurt.”

“It’s fine, bastards just did a shit job of knocking me out. Been through worse. I’d kill for a shower though.”

“You,” Michael gives a hoarse laugh of relief. He’s trying to focus on the cage and open it quietly, but his hands are shaking, adrenaline running its course. “Can’t believe you’re making jokes at a time like this.”

“Thanks, it’s the trauma. Now get me the hell out of here.” 

There’s no lock to unlatch, Michael looks over the cage.

“I think it’s an electronic lock. They trigger it from inside that control booth.” 

“What the fuck kind of place is this? Who are these freaks?” Michael’s never really bent metal before. He’s bust open jail cells and bent spoons out of boredom but he doesn’t know if he can peel these open _and_ be quiet while doing it.

Alex talks as Michael concentrates on moving the metal bars apart, inch by aching inch, trying not to make the metal groan. “Some fucking hicks who are like, hardcore doomsday alien apocalypse survivalist types. They keep these cages for aliens. I made the mistake of flashing my military badge. Bet you can guess what happened next.”

A bead of sweat drips down Michael’s neck. “Jesus.” 

“Yeah, so now they’re convinced I know where the aliens are, or where I’m hiding them, wouldn’t believe me no matter how many times I said I didn’t.” 

“C’mon.” As soon as there’s a big enough gap in the bars, Michael offers Alex a hand to grab. When Alex rises though, he notices—

“Fuck, your prosthetic.” 

“Yeah. They took it. I assume my car’s gone too.”

“Found it on the interstate. It’s getting towed back. Think you can climb a ladder with one leg?” 

“What other options have I got?” says Alex, and when he holds out an arm like a broken wing, it only feels natural to sidle up to support him, the two of them making a three-legged beast in the dark.

“How’d you find me?” Alex groans, his weight sagging a bit with exhaustion as they limp for the ladder. 

“Lucky for you, we’ve got skills.”

“We?”

“Max and Iz. You didn’t think I came alone, did you?”

As if on cue, there’s a sudden commotion up above, a shout and a gunshot, then quiet. 

Alex tenses beside him, breathing heavily. “Guerin—”

The door at the end of the hallway opens, a man with a rifle and full camouflage walks out and sees them.

Fuck. 

It seems to happen in slow motion, the way the man raises his gun, brown-stained teeth gnashing as he takes aim. Fires. 

(The first time Michael used his powers he was seven years old. Anything before that had been a fluke he wasn’t even aware or capable of connecting to himself. It was that day. That Day. The day the Evans’ came to the group home and picked out Max and Isobel. Michael had tried to go with them, packed up his belongings and tried to follow them out only to be stopped by the social worker. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t go with them. He didn’t understand English and he didn’t understand why they were taking the only people he knew and he didn’t understand and he was so scared and he didn’t understand. Someone picked him up to carry him back inside the house and Michael had screamed. The genuine temper tantrum of a child, which would have been normal for a seven year old, had not the pipes within the building next door burst, flooding the building and the street and the yard of the group home, moments after the Evanses had driven away. 

That was the first time had noticed, felt his ability within him. One minute, fear. One minute, confusion. One minute, pain. The next, rage. Power. A visceral thing coming alive within him, terrible and unknown and _his_. Something no one could ever take away.)

The bullet misses Michael, but Alex grunts beside him, faltering in his stance and clutching at his shoulder. Clipped, most likely. Nothing fatal. Nothing they can’t fix once they get out of here. 

But Alex’s hand comes away red, and the world around Michael goes white. 

He throws a hand out behind him, hears the sound of Alex’s body hitting brick as he pushes him backwards. The man’s gun _explodes_, and he falls to the ground, crying out in pain. The cages burst apart one by one, steel rending apart like fireworks, reforming like a cage around the man, trapping him in against the concrete floor. 

Another figure comes charging out of the bunker, toting an assault rifle. Michael jerks his head and the gun snaps in two, careens to the other side of the room. 

He watches, practically calm, as the man—young, possibly still a boy—takes in the room, the floating pieces of prison bar, as the fear begins to register. Watches the whites of his eyes as he realizes just who he’s dealing with, what he’s dealing with.

(But at seven years old, that first touch of power had been nothing like this, with a body that feels like a livewire, like someone put a cattle prod to his spine. At seven Michael Guerin hadn’t wanted to hurt anybody. He just wanted to be with the people he loved. But right now, he leans into nature. Into the thing that makes him a killer. He’s the thing people tell stories about, whisper about. He’s the monster that lives in the dark, fearful but elusive, now fully realized.) 

Michael flicks his wrist, and a piece of bar clobbers the kid over the head, knocking him out cold. 

Distantly, below the ringing in his ears, he can hear a few shouts and more gunshots but they don’t touch him. They don’t touch him, and they most certainly don’t touch Alex. They will never touch Alex again. 

“Guerin.”

Alex. 

He turns and—Alex is looking at him, leaning against the wall, no, _pinned there_, because Michael is holding him still and Alex looks terrified, limbs twitching uselessly against an invisible force, staring at Michael like he’s not human, not human at all. 

Gently, slowly, he lets Alex slide back to the ground. 

The whole basement looks like a hurricane tore through, right in the middle of the desert. 

“I’m—” The world suddenly rushes back in at Michael, and he’s aware that his nose is gushing blood, a steady drip, bitter on his tongue, and his head is _pounding_, ten times worse than the worst hangover he’s ever had. 

He crumbles forward, collapsing on his knees, palms striking concrete so sharply they sting. And for a moment, all he and Alex do is look at each other. He drinks in the expression on Alex’s face, committing it to memory. Carving the shape of it into a brain so he never does that again. 

“You guys alright down there?” A familiar voice calls down the tunnel.

“We’re alright,” Alex shouts hoarsely, eyes locked with Michael’s. “We’re alright.” 

Then they’re there, both of them. Max and Isobel, with a few scrapes but otherwise okay. Max is there, with an arm beneath Alex’s, staunching the blood, helping him up to get him up the ladder. 

Then Isobel is there, cupping his face, bringing his eyes to hers. He never got the twin thing, really. That was always Max and Iz, with the sixth sense connection. He always felt like the third wheel on the twin train, or maybe the awkward caboose, but Isobel looks at him now and all he sees is the sister who depended on him when Max was going off the walls. The sister he buried bodies for. Burned them, too. He remembers the day they saw each other again, after he was relocated back to Roswell. She’d held him so tight his ribs hurt. She’d cried. 

And he can’t read her mind nor find her in a desert like Max but he knows that she’s here and she’s asking him without words, _What do you need? What can I do? Tell me, and it’s done_. 

“Wipe ‘em,” Michael gasps, the energy coursing through his body a few moments ago now completely tapped. “Make them forget aliens. Make them forget _him_, who he was, that he was here at all. If there’s a map in their minds and Roswell’s on it, I want it gone. I don’t want them within a hundred mile radius of it.” 

-

Once they’re in the car and on the road, Isobel pushing the speed limit as much as she can without drawing the attention of State Patrol, they don’t risk pulling over until they find a rest-stop outside of Tucson. The stop is brief, clothed in darkness. Isobel breaks into the vending machine while Max heals Alex’s wound and Alex debriefs—_they ambushed me after dark, car had broken down, woke up in a cage_—while he chugs half a gallon of water, so much that Isobel has to stop him so he won’t make himself sick. 

Michael stumbles from the truck on shaky legs and vomits on the concrete. Twice. 

“We should be back home by morning,” Max says from the front seat. Alex makes hums from where he sits, staring out the window into the black. The bruise on over his eye reminds Michael of high school all over again, pulling him into a bathroom, touching him like he’d done it a thousand times before. 

Now, Michael pushes his own body as far against his window side backseat as he can, making sure they’re not even close. He can’t get the look on Alex’s face out of his head, but he clings to that. He never wants to lose control like that ever again.

Alex’s white shirt is covered in his own blood. 

“Alex honey, are you hungry?” Isobel calls into the back seat, like she’s a concerned babysitter checking on a playdate. “We’ve got trailmix and saladitos and pretty much every candy I could grab from the vending machine. Not really a gourmet buffet, but it should hold you over.”

There’s a pause. “Do you have any Skittles?” 

Max tosses back a bag and Michael catches it, making sure he subtly removes the purples and acting like he got a mixed handful before handing the packet over to Alex. Their fingers brush, legs pressing briefly as Alex shifts closer to accept the bag, and Michael fights the urge to back handspring out the fucking sunroof. 

He doesn’t care for purple Skittles much either, but Michael swallows them all. Every single one. 

Another short silence, Alex chewing, followed by, “Thanks for coming to get me.” 

Guilt rolls in Michael’s stomach. He wants to grab Alex and shake him just a little bit. What the fuck is Alex thanking him for? After what Michael had almost done? Michael could have killed him. 

“Don’t worry about it, man.” Max, ever dependable. 

“It must be tiring,” Alex says dryly. “Looking after us humans like we’re your ill-behaved pets or something.”

His gaze flickers over to Michael and then out the window again. 

“Not at all. But if it helps, Manes, I happen to think you’re much cuter than a puppy,” Isobel sing-songs.

When Alex gives a small laugh, Michael presses further against his side of the car, the belt buckle digging into his hip. 

They pass through from Arizona to New Mexico, and Alex’s head finally tips to the side as he falls asleep. 

It looks awkward. He’ll be stiff-necked in the morning. Michael’s sore just looking at him, but he isn’t in any shape to be using his powers and even given the chance, he wouldn’t. So he slides over in the passenger seat and tries to gently guide Alex’s head back into a more comfortable sleeping position. 

But Alex’s body seems to have realized that he doesn’t have to be upright and rigid anymore. It’s funny, Michael would have taken Alex for a light sleeper, used to foxholes and sunrise alarms. But he doesn’t wake at Michael’s touch. Rather, he leans over and curls up like a cat, with his head right on Michael’s lap. 

Michael doesn’t move.

Alex sighs, deep in sleep, cheek rubbing against the material of Michael’s jeans. Maybe humans _are_ a little bit like ill-behaved pets. Surely just as naive as them. Two hours ago Alex had looked terrified of Michael, had looked at Michael like he was a monster. Now he was here, cuddling up to the monster’s lap. 

There isn’t a chance in hell that Michael is falling asleep tonight. 

The irony of all of this is that forty-eight hours ago Michael was getting dumped. And now—

Now Alex’s breath even out, legato contractions of his ribs beneath Michael’s palm. Now Michael wants to fit his fingers just beneath Alex’s jaw, find his pulse, keep it there the whole way home. Wants to. Doesn’t. Now Michael wants to wake him up and say _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m a monster, I’m sorry—_

No. He wants to say much more than that. If the way he’d acted tonight was any indication, any hint, he had a lot more to say to Alex than just I’m sorry. He has a whole fucking archive of things to say. 

His teeth ache, candy-sweet. 

“You know what you’re doing there?” Isobel’s eyes flash in the rearview mirror. Not scolding. Worried. 

“Do any of us?” Michael whispers, glancing at Max, who looks equally annoying amounts of concerned. “You’re not exactly the poster child for making good choices in life partners.” 

He regrets it, even if he’s right. It’s not worth the flash of hurt on his sister’s face. “Just be careful, is all.”

_You’re too late_, he wants to say. Careful came and went ten years ago, when a boy who owed nothing to no one handed him a guitar. 

True to Isobel’s prediction, they pull up to Max’s place at sunrise, sky turning from black to a lighter purple. The Ortecho sisters stand like sentinels on the driveway in bunny slippers and pajamas. Liz runs over to Alex as soon as the car parks and throws herself at him. 

“Ay díos mio, _kidnapped_, and you’re covered in blood. Get your shit together, Manes,” she says. “Kyle’s on-call until noon, but we can take you into the hospital if you need it.” 

Alex waves her off. “I’m fine, I’m fine. He can look at me later. Really I just need Tylenol and one of your dad’s chili burgers. And a fuckton of water.”

“I’ll text Maria, she’s on a provisions run.” And then Isobel is at his side, helping Alex upright, Rosa appearing at the other. 

Michael forces himself to keep his distance no matter how much his fingers twitch. His thigh is still warm from where Alex’s cheek had been pressed. When they turned off the highway onto dirt road he’d startled awake, eyelashes fluttering, blinking at Michael for a long moment with something almost like a smile, before realizing where he was and how he was and sitting up with an awkward _Sorry_. 

There’s still a jean crease on his cheek. On the side of his head that’s not bruised, his hair looks soft and fluffy, stuck up in the back like he just woke up from a long uninterrupted sleep, safe and sound in his warm bed. 

Michael would do terrible things for him, without hesitation. 

Liz turns to him. “How about you? Mint chocolate milkshake topped with Bailey’s and...cajun fries? Oh, glad you’re not dead by the way. Dumbass.”

“Once more, with enthusiasm,” Michael drawls, feeling like he’s got something to prove just by speaking as if everything’s fine, and she scrubs a hand through his hair, as affectionate as she’s ever been with him. 

“You know.” She grins. “If you want to get out of science shenanigans next time, just ask.” 

Michael manages an eyeroll, and it feels like shaking loose whatever cold and terrible thing had crept into him overnight. “Yeah, alright, go see your boyfriend.”

When Liz sees Max, it’s like she somehow hadn’t known he was there. There’s a current that runs between them as they walk towards each other. Michael’s definitely a little delirious from lack of sleep, but it feels like witnessing something with a little magic. The way she looks at him before she stands on her tiptoes and presses her forehead to his, and neither of them say a word. 

Michael wonders at the sheer enormity of love Liz Ortecho must carry in her heart, to love his brother despite all the warning signs. Despite the terrible things he’s done and likely will do, because after all, it’s in their nature. Max got dead lucky, that’s for sure. 

Michael turns away and walks towards the house. 

***

5.

In retrospect, the whole ordeal is 100% Kyle Valenti’s fault. 

He genuinely has no idea when this happened, but at some point or another, Alex and Kyle became friends. It is the weirdest friendship dynamic in the history of odd couple friendship dynamics, Michael will literally never understand how it works. Kyle bullied Alex all throughout high school and now they’re like, BFFs? They go to the gym together to spot each other on the weight machines? Sometimes they drink beer and watch _The Great British Bake-off_ in Alex’s cabin? Michael’s got no fucking clue what that’s about. 

Either way, he doesn’t have a problem with Alex and Valenti’s budding broship until—

“What does ‘masc 4 masc’ mean?” 

Michael’s head whips around so fast his neck cricks. In front of him, the campfire crackles, a shower of sparks going up, but Michael pays them no mind as he stares over to where Kyle and Alex are seated at a picnic table at the drive-in, Kyle looking over Alex’s shoulder at his phone. 

“Masculine for masculine—so they’re not into effeminate guys,” Alex explains calmly, like he’s telling a toddler why the sky is blue. “Super manly men need only apply.” 

“Ooh, _please_ tell me you caved and got a dating app.” Maria jumps from her spot next to Michael and runs over, like a _traitor_. 

“It took some arm-twisting on Kyle’s part, but yeah.” Alex holds up his phone, showing off what is evidently his profile. Michael’s fifteen feet away but finds himself peering as if he can see. “Alex Manes, single and ready to mingle.” 

“Oh my god, please let me swipe some guys for you,” Maria pleads, wiggling her way onto the bench next to him. “I’ve only waited for you to get out there on the market my entire life.” 

Alex laughs softly, and it could just be the campfire glow, but it looks like he’s blushing. He hands the phone over to her. “I don’t think the prospects are high out here in Roswell. Especially for me.” 

“What, a hot sexy soldier with daddy issues? Dude, I feel like that’s _the_ type for most people.” Kyle claps Alex on the back. “And don’t tell me the whole act hasn’t worked for you before.” 

Kyle looks up at Michael with a smirk, and Michael furiously turns around and takes a swig of his beer, feigning disinterest. 

He thinks he can feel someone—Liz, maybe—staring at him from across the firepit, but he refuses to acknowledge. 

“Okay, so what are we looking for, huh?” Maria starts swiping so fast her thumb blurs. “Oh, he’s cute. Are you into big beefy tops? Cute twinks? What are we shopping for here, Alex? What’s your type?” 

Michael kicks his feet up like he’s stretching and leans back in his chair, straining to hear. 

“Um.” Alex’s voice goes a bit quiet, shy. “I don’t know.” 

Okay, Liz is definitely staring at him. Michael glares at her, but she only continues staring as they both eavesdrop in.

“Well, what sort of qualities do you like in a guy?” 

There’s a pause, then: “Someone with a kind heart, I guess. Someone who’s not gonna look at all my baggage and cut and run. Willing to respect my independence. My autonomy.”

Maria chuckles, “I mean that’s all very romantic, Manes, but let’s think deeper. What floats your boat when it comes to a dude? Be shallow. Be _horny_. I don’t mind.” 

Alex looks like he wants the earth to open up and swallow him whole. Not that Michael is looking. “I like. Uh. Calluses. Hands. Someone who helps build things up instead of tear them down.”

Suddenly, urgently, Michael needs something stronger than beer. 

“Alright, now we’re getting somewhere.” Maria starts tapping away. “Let’s find you a big sexy mountain man to build you two a house.” 

Alex laughs. “Why don’t we just...see what’s out there before we find me a husband, okay? We don’t even know that I’ll meet someone. Let alone date them.”

He seems to change his tune not two weeks later, when Michael asks to hang out and Alex tells him he has a date. 

(Okay, so it didn’t go quite like that. Really it was Michael asking what Alex was doing after the meeting, seeing if Alex wanted to go dutch on one of Rosa’s fancy intricately decorated chocolate cakes that she’d been making out of sheer boredom, and hole up in Michael’s trailer with a joint that Alex wouldn’t smoke and maybe pick up their Star Wars rewatch. Michael’s kept his distance ever since the whole mess at Gila Bend, but they left off at Clone Wars and Michael...misses being around him.

Anyways, Alex said he had business to take care of down in Carlsbad and was going to be skipping the meeting. It only took twenty seconds of texting Maria to get confirmation that yes, Alex was going on a date.

_His name is Chasen. He’s a firefighter, _she tacked on, because she was Maria and she seemed to know exactly the right way to twist the knife.) 

Anyways, Alex has a date with The Firefighter, and Michael’s totally cool with it. As a friend should be. Cool and supportive. Just totally 100% completely chill, not an issue, super duper happy for Alex. He’s feeling swell, pleasantly neutral on the whole matter, as he walks into the lab at Roswell Hospital and Liz takes one goddamn look at him and goes, “What crawled up your ass and died?” 

“Nothing,” Michael says innocently.

“Okay…” Liz gives him a look. “So the literal rain cloud following you around like you’re the alien personification of Eeyore is just...”

“Coincidence? Yup.” He turns to the lab table. “What are we working with today?” 

She sighs and pushes away from the counter. “Actually, I was thinking today we could play hooky and go for a little adventure. The thing is, we were talking—Maria and I—and we’re not so sure about this date Alex is going on.”

Something hot spikes in Michael’s blood. He forces himself not to react, keeping his eyes trained on a random page of Liz’s notes as he asks, “What do you mean?”

Liz shrugs. “Just a feeling. The other night, Alex was nervous about flirting so he was showing us their texts on the app so we could help him some cute responses, and like. I don’t know. The guy seemed kind of douchey. Hot, but douchey.” 

Michael is a perfect rictus of calm. Marble statues ain’t got shit on him. “And you wanted to...what, crash his date?”

“No! Nothing that drastic. Just. You know. Looking out for a friend. Be there if things do go south.” Liz fidgets under Michael’s stare. “Totally fine if you don’t want to go, given your relationship with Alex.”

“We’re friends,” says Michael, and almost winces at how defensive it sounds. 

“Right right. I just thought…” Liz gives him another searching look. “Anyways, Maria and I figured, you know, safety in numbers.”

Safety in numbers. Michael mulls it over. On the one hand, this is totally inappropriate and a violation of Alex’s trust in their tentative friendship and if Alex were to find out he’d probably be really pissed. But on the other hand, Liz is right. Alex is his friend. It’d be irresponsible not to look out for a friend. It’s not like Michael’s trying to ruin the date. If anything, he’s doing the opposite. 

That’s what he tells himself, at least. 

“If he catches us he will murder us. You know that, right?” 

“Obviously.” She rolls her eyes. “Good thing I don’t plan on getting caught.” 

He’d made the idiot mistake of thinking that Liz and Maria, as the point men, would keep things under wraps and not tell a soul. 

But apparently Liz _had_ to tell Max, who told Isobel, who told literally _everyone_, and when Michael pulled his truck around to pick up Liz and Maria an hour later he found everyone standing out on the curb behind the Crashdown. So what was a three-man job was now a seven person family vacation, stuffed into two cars and walkie-talking back and forth. The drive takes about an hour on a two-lane highway that’s practically empty, and what started out as a game of hooky somehow becomes a game of tag, of road racing, honking horns and blasting music and trying to outstrip each other on an empty road—Michael in his truck with his siblings, Kyle with his jeep, the Ortechos and Maria across from them, making faces and shouting insults like this is a Fast & Furious movie and they’re not going well within the New Mexico speed limits. 

They’ve got time to kill before Alex’s date. According to Maria, who demanded an address from Alex in case his date turned out to be a whacko alien conspiracy theorist who wanted to put him in a cage—Alex is at a cozy low-lit Italian place in the town’s main square. They pick up snacks at a gas station and wander the neighborhood after Liz insists that no date heist is complete without disguises, and Isobel agrees, which leads them to the town thrift store to scrounge for “covert” outfits, in the most ridiculous and over the top display that Michael had ever seen. Liz coerces Max into wearing a truly spectacular purple velvet pantsuit with a feather boa and Michael laughs so hard he cries. 

It all feels so _high school_, road tripping and playing dress up and playing music too loud. They all grew up together but they so rarely get to do things like _this_. Hang out. Have fun. Like they’re a gang of regular teenagers, instead of a group of pretty fucked up twenty-somethings with a basketful of issues shared between the lot of them, just trying to make the best with what they have. 

It had been fun. Until Alex finally spotted them in the restaurant not even halfway through his dinner date. 

They’d been really good about covering their tracks, spreading out all over the restaurant in pairs, hiding behind menus and strategically placed ficuses. 

It all fell to shit pretty fast considering how much time they’d spent preparing. But then, that was definitely Michael’s fault. 

The thing was—for a moment, just a moment, before Michael ruined everything—Alex looked like he was actually having a good time on his date. He was dressed in a light blue button-down with the sleeves rolled up. A nice pair of dark-wash jeans that Michael doesn’t think he’s ever seen him in. He was smiling, making conversation with his date among the romantic candlelight glow. Michael wasn’t supposed to be staring, he was supposed to be covert. But the longer he looked at Alex on his date the more a horrid little voice in his head whispered _This is what Alex looks like happy_, _this is what he looks like when he’s not embarrassed to be seen with someone_.

_This is what he looks like when that someone isn’t you. _

Hot possessive jealousy probably would have been easier to deal with if only because Michael had been expecting it. This quiet twang and pull of his heart strings, however? Watching everything he wants for Alex play out while he pines in agonized silence from across a restaurant? This wasn’t something Michael had signed up for. 

Honestly, it’s a wonder Alex didn’t spot him sooner. 

Michael didn’t realize he’d been caught until they’d already been looking at each other for several long seconds, eyes locked, and by then it was too late to hide, helpless to watch as Alex’s face dawned with recognition, then confusion, then an expression that Michael’s never seen on Alex Manes’ face but is ninety percent sure is akin to tampered murderous rage. 

Now that he’s here, standing in front of Michael, fists literally clenched with fury, Michael has to admit that maybe they could have been better at the whole subtlety thing. 

“What the _fuck_,” Alex breathes, “are you doing here.” 

Michael spots The Firefighter craning his neck from the table to see who Alex is talking to. The guy is...chiseled. He looks like he has great callused hands. 

“Look.” Michael’s gaze snaps back to Alex. “If you’re jealous, this sure as hell isn’t the way to express it.” 

Michael starts backtracking immediately. “Uh, wait, no it’s not what it looks—”

“—Like you’re here to sabotage my date? Mark your territory?” Alex is pissed, but he’s quiet-pissed, contained-pissed. He’s not yelling or screaming but his words are laced with venom, and it’s maybe the angriest Michael has ever seen Alex in a way that’s directed at him. 

Michael’s brain is absolutely scrambling. He fucked up, he fucked up so bad. “But I—”

“You know you never showed up to the junkyard,” Alex fumes, and the excuses in Michael’s mouth evaporate. “I said I’d be there to work things out, and you never showed. In fact, you pretty much did the opposite of show, so, whatever the hell this is, we're not together. I’m not yours. You don’t get to bust in here like some kind of lone ranger and—and you know what? I’m not a mind reader, Guerin, you can’t just—”

Someone behind Michael’s shoulder clears their throat loudly. Alex cuts off, eyes widening as he glances over. 

“Wait…” His expression shifts from murderous back to confused, and Michael knows his eyes are locked on the table where Isobel and Maria are seated. “What is this.” 

Michael watches as Alex scans the restaurant, taking in all their friends. 

“It’s my fault.” Liz pipes up, sliding over to Michael with a drink in her hand, looking tipsier than Michael remembers her being, “Maria mentioned you having a date and I just...I got worried. You know. Since the last time you took off you ended up being literally put in a cage. So, in a very well meaning and not at all mother-henning way—we just came to make sure your date wasn’t a wackjob conspiracy theorist here to kidnap you. Right, Michael?” 

Michael, around the same level of shock as Alex, nods dumbly. 

“You...oh.” Alex looks at Michael with dawning horror, and his face turns a brilliant red. “This is. A friend intervention.”

“Of course,” Liz lies, and Michael could kiss her for knowing just what to say. “What, you think we were here to crash and ruin your date?” 

“I.” Alex looks thoroughly embarrassed, but he clears his throat. “I appreciate y’all looking out for me. But I don’t need a babysitter. He’s. He’s not a conspiracy theorist. He’s normal.” 

Normal. Human. Not a monster. Got it. 

“Well, that’s great!” Liz beams. “Glad to hear it! We’ll just,” she makes a flurrying motion and their group scatters like birds, speed walking for the doors. “We’ll just get out of your hair then. Have fun, but not too much fun!” 

“Thanks. We will.” Then she’s gone. 

There’s an utterly horrific pause where Alex doesn’t look Michael in the eye. Michael can’t tell if Alex seems angry or sheepish or sad. “Sorry for biting your head off, Guerin.”

“It’s...fine.” It’s not fine. Michael’s gonna go home and have a night’s worth of nightmares about the words _I’m not yours_ for maybe the rest of his life. “Look, if the guy’s normal, that’s great. But I’m gonna—,” Michael weighs the risk of even putting this out there and decides _fuck it_. “There’s a bar across the street. I’ll be there. If things go downhill, or you need anything, you know where to find me.” 

“I don’t need your help,” Alex says stubbornly. 

“Right.” Michael slaps a twenty on the counter and heads out. 

The gang seems reluctant to leave him, but Michael is insistent on staying. Even if Alex is right and the guy is Normal and they fall in love and build a large house and adopt five hundred dogs—Michael wants to be here just in case. Just in case.

He sits at the bar, sipping at a Coke and watching the minute hand on the clock for the next hour. He wants to argue with Alex—he wasn’t _jealous_. Michael is a dick, but he’s not enough of a dick to start a fight with someone because Alex might want them. However, this might not have been a storm the chapel sort of effort, it wasn’t completely devoid of the sort of thing Michael should have kept locked down. 

What crawled up his ass and died, Liz had asked. Normally the answer to that would lie at the bottom of a bottle. But Michael has to drive himself home after this humiliating debacle. So it’s just him and his zoned out and sadly sober thoughts until either Alex shows up or Alex announces his engagement to Chasen the Firefighter. 

Someone taps his shoulder. 

His first observation upon turning around is that Alex is drunk. 

“Hiya.” Correction: very drunk. 

“Hey.” Michael can’t help it. He bites down a smile. “Are you...okay? Is everything okay?”

“Oh I’m great.” Alex gives a salute. “Super great.”

“Uh.” 

Alex shifts, bringing his gaze to the floor. He mumbles something too low to hear. 

“What?”

“I said, can you please take me home,” Alex murmurs, and then flinches, and then swears. “Fuck, sorry, that—I swear I wouldn’t ask. But I’ve had a bit to drink, and it was a bad night and I just want to go home.”

Michael stands. “Did that fucker—”

“No, no. Just a bad date. He didn’t try anything. He just bailed. It’s fine. I’m fine, just.” Alex makes a vague waving gesture with his hand. He seems to notice a few curious onlookers and shrinks into himself, the way he did when they were kids. His voice comes out very small. “Please take me home.” 

Michael doesn’t need to be told twice. 

He hits the 285 pushing 70, and watches Alex roll the window down and dip his head into the wind, hair ruffling, almost smiling to himself. The cold night air seems to help him sober up just a bit, which makes him wonder how much Alex actually had to drink. It’s possible that he’s just a terrible, incurable lightweight. The thought makes something tender prick in his chest.

Michael fiddles with the dials on the radio, helpless and needing to fidget. Something soft and staticky comes through on acoustic guitar and Michael can’t help but wonder if Alex is thinking of the same thing Michael is. Another late night drive, beneath stars, underscored with music, driving like they could outrun the things chasing them. Sometimes he thinks Alex never did. 

He thinks about Alex in the restaurant earlier, the fury that had poured off of him, _we’re not together, I’m not yours_. 

Had Michael been jealous? Yeah. But he hadn’t—he hadn’t shown up with any expectation of wooing Alex back. He knows that chance withered up and died long ago, he can’t help the tumbleweeds from it. It was more fulfillment of a fucked up masochistic fantasy more than anything. Like if he saw Alex happy with someone else, laughing and talking and looking at some other guy, that that would dull the thing that’s been yanking at his insides like a fishhook for weeks, for months. 

“I like this song.” Alex tips his head back against the seat, eyes closed. 

“Death Cab for Cutie?”

“An oldie but a goodie.” Alex hums, expression serene enough that Michael knows he’s still pretty lost in the sauce. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” He ventures cautiously. 

“Not much to say. Guy was a dick. Nothing I couldn’t handle, but still a dick.” 

“Is that why you’re drunk?”

Alex opens one eye, then sits up. “No, Guerin. I’m drunk because you were right, and I hate that.” 

“Hate what?”

“Hate how you’re always saving me.” 

Michael frowns in confusion. “I wasn’t trying to be the hero.”

“Yet here you are.” Alex waves a hand, helpless, making a point and, well, Michael doesn’t have anything to say to that. “And I still owe you one.” 

“Owe me what?” Michael asks, but Alex suddenly cranks the music up again, putting his feet up on the dash, and evidently that’s the end of that. 

They pull up to Alex’s cabin not twenty minutes later, Michael cutting the engine. Alex is still drunk, but not as drunk. Muted drunk. Pensive drunk, by the looks of it. 

He waits for Alex to unbuckle his seatbelt and get out but Alex doesn’t move. 

“Why did you drive me back?” he asks. 

Michael fidgets, fingers tapping. “Because you asked me to.”

“Yeah but, you could’ve said no. You didn’t have to wait at the bar for me. You didn’t have to do any of this. I want to know why, Guerin.” 

Michael can’t answer that. His heart feels all fluttery and panicky in his chest, cornered. 

It’s not that he doesn’t know the answer. It’s just that every time he’s put the answer out there, something always goes wrong. Alex joins the military. Alex takes off before sunrise. Alex tells him that he can’t be with a criminal. Alex leaves, Alex always leaves. 

And Alex_ should_ leave. Michael isn’t good for him. Michael doesn’t build things up. Michael doesn’t contribute to this world or this planet apart from how badly he wants to leave it. 

He doesn’t even get around to answering, because that’s when Alex leans across the stick shift and kisses him. 

“Whoa.” Michael jerks back out of range. “Hold up a second.” 

“Don’t ruin it,” Alex groans, and tries to lean in again. “Isn’t this what you wanted?” 

“Alex. _Alex_.” Michael gently takes hold of his wrists. “We shouldn’t—you’re drunk.” 

In a split second, Alex’s face goes from open and wanting to twisted, bitter. 

“Stop doing that,” he snaps. 

“I—doing what?”

“_Saving me_,” says Alex, swinging back in his seat. “I’m a grown man, Guerin. Let me make my own stupid decisions.” He rounds on Michael. “Or do I not do it for you anymore?” 

“I’m.” Michaels’s so far off track that he doesn’t even know how they got here. “We’re friends. I wasn’t going to—”

“Oh please,” Alex rolls his eyes and Michael hates, _hates_ how much he looks like his father when he’s angry. His words aren’t slurring but they’re rushed together, nowhere near as controlled as he usually is. “We are not _friends_. We have never been friends. That’s just the fucked up lie we keep telling to make everything between us seem fine when it’s not. It never has been.” 

And—that hurts. Like a punch. Like a fucking hammer to the fist, all bones shattered. 

Alex doesn’t stop there, “You show up to my date, but you say you’re just looking out for me. You _drive me home_, and when I try to kiss you, you won’t _let_ me. You’re so busy trying to save everyone you don’t even have a life, just sitting around in this stupid fucking town waiting for the next person who will let you fall on your sword for them.”

“Hey, that’s not fair—”

“No, you know what’s not fair? Finally opening myself up to you after spending my whole goddamn life running, finally trying to stand still, and you don’t say anything. You’re not just an idiot with a martyr complex, Guerin. You’re a coward. You’re a coward who won’t kiss me.”

Michael glares, something hard and sharp edged climbing into his throat. “Is that what you want, Alex? You want me to kiss you because you’re drunk and sad and want to pretend like we’re seventeen again? Like it doesn’t matter what we do because we both know you’re just gonna leave anyhow?” 

Alex reels like he’s been slapped. He can’t hide any of the emotions behind a soldier’s expression, not with this many drinks in him. It’s bleeding all over his face. 

Michael tries to reign in his own anger. “You say we're not friends, but from my perspective, I'm the one who stayed. I'm the one who's been here. For you. And you—you _left_. Again. And Again. And again.”

“You’re telling me that you’re not trying the exact same thing with those pieces of UFO you spend all your time fiddling with? That you’re not just dying to get out the first chance you get?” 

“That’s different and you know it.” He won’t apologize for trying to find his way back to where he came from, for trying to make sense of his being here in the first place. He won't. “I’m—fuck, I’m trying, Alex. I know I don’t make it easy. I know I’m not—maybe I’m not your friend, Alex. But you’re mine.”

Off in the desert, a lone coyote howls, calling its pack.

“I can’t be friends with you, Guerin,” Alex says quietly. “I just can’t.” 

“So what do you want from me, then?” 

Alex’s eyes spark angrily. “Either fuck me and move on or _let me_ move on, Guerin. Quit treating me with kid gloves, quit trying to—to _protect_ me. There’s no way to cushion the blow, so stop fucking trying.”

No middle ground. Fuck him or don’t. Either way, Alex still leaves. 

For a moment, Michael almost caves, cracks open right down the middle. Almost tells Alex every single thing he’s been holding in for months now, for years. 

_If someone’s going to destroy me, it might as well be you_, he once said to Alex. Maybe if he could hand over his heart to Alex, let Alex take a good look before he decided he didn’t want it, handing it back in broken pieces, maybe that would stick. Maybe _then_ Michael actually could move on. 

But he knows better than that. Ten years and a war happened between them, and that hadn’t stuck. Maybe love worked like that for some people—time and distance and frequency a measure of its strength. But Alex wasn’t a bruise or a burn that would heal and scar over. He was the weapon itself, the knife between Michael’s ribs that he couldn’t pull out without bleeding to death. 

Alex is looking at him, waiting for Michael to say something, to _do_ something. But Michael can’t. If he kisses Alex, and Alex leaves again, Michael will absolutely break. 

He hesitates a moment too long. 

“Right.” Alex nods, short. Stumbles when he gets out of the car, sloppy in his movements.

And then, because Michael’s angry, because he’s hurt, because he’s never known how to hold something in his hands and keep it there without breaking it, he says, “Sure hope you don’t change your mind, Manes. This time I might not be around when you decide to come back.” 

The cabin door slams. 

Michael punches the steering wheel. He should go after him. He should tell him everything. Michael should park his fucking car and wait until Alex comes out the next morning so they can talk this out, sober, in broad daylight. 

But Michael drives away. Turns out he’s good at leaving, too. 

***

+1

For the first few days of his captivity, Michael sits in the dark. 

It’s boring as all hell, though he’ll regret thinking that later. He tries to sleep when his body wants to sleep, if only so he can keep track of how many days are going by. But time slips out of his hands pretty quickly with no daylight in sight. 

It was his fault. That he knows. They were up in Northern New Mexico—him, Max and Iz. Chasing a lead that Alex had set them on—Alex, who hadn’t spoken to Michael in three days since the disaster in Carlsbad, except to hand him a file and say _got a lead for you_ in a completely blank voice that deep down Michael knew he deserved. 

So they were following a lead, and the lead was a dud, and the Evans-Guerin family decided to call it a day at the local bar before heading back in the morning. 

Now that he has the time to dwell on it, Michael doesn’t know who saw him and when. He used his powers the whole night, to win the game of darts against Max, to help Isobel swindle some of the guys at the pool table for free drinks, to crack open his beer. He was using it throughout the night, little tricks, innocent fun. It was a crowded local bar. He didn’t think anyone would notice. 

It wasn’t until he snuck out to the alley to take a leak and found himself with a gun to his head that it occurred to Michael someone did. 

They tranqued him before he had time to do anything, and he’s glad for it. If he fought, fighting would mean a sound, a bang, an explosion of force and energy, something that his siblings would feel. If he’d fought, even if he’d won, Max and Iz would have come running for him. And if there were others like the one who took Michael out, they’d be in trouble too. There’s always more of a fighting chance for the three of them if it’s just Michael in the crosshairs. 

That’s what he told himself at least, as the tranquilizer kicked in and the world flickered to black. He was just waking up when they brought him into the building, a scant glimpse of facilities before they threw him into the hole; government goons with suits and guns and surfaces so sterile Michael can taste it in the air. Antiseptic wash and metal. The cells seem to be infused with something he can’t manipulate. His powers ineffective. 

For those first few days, just Michael his thoughts and the dark, there’s plenty of hope that others might find him, will know how to track him down, will rescue him soon. Max and Iz—they’re smart. He’s got no clue where he is or what he’s doing there but he’s sure it’s not anything good. 

Then they bring him out of the dark and—well. The days get a lot harder to track after that.

“Capture” was something him, Isobel and Max talked about the way other kids their age talked about ghosts, scary stories, the monster under the bed. Capture, someone taking them far away and killing them like a lab rat. Worst fear: someone cutting them open to see what’s inside. Finding the best way to kill them, or at least suppress their powers, leaving them defenseless. 

How fucking naive they had been. 

The very particles of the air hurt where they touch his skin. Which is to say, everything does. 

“Subject appears to be stable. Heart rate is skyrocketing, but that’s to be expected. Waiting on further results.” The scientist nods. “Go on.” 

Michael would try to memorize her face, try to commit it to memory so he can flay the skin off her body when he has the chance, but he can’t pin her image down. His vision is vibrating, and he can’t tell if that’s because the drug they just gave him is fucking with his perception, or because his whole body is vibrating where he lies. He feels like if he moves his spine will snap in half. 

“It doesn’t seem to understand.” 

“I was clear with my instructions.”

“Is this the first dose?”

“Affirmative.”

“Put it back in the hole. Try another dose when you take it out. Let’s get it used to routine.” 

He makes the mistake of thinking he could fight it off, whatever they put in him. But he sits in the black for what feels like days and the next time they open his cage doors he’s so hungry he’s almost out of his mind. He doesn’t beg for it, but he’s thinking about it, and that’s what makes it worse. He just holds his arm out, compliant. 

It goes like this and then some. Drug, then test, then back in the hole, rinse, lather, repeat. Routine. 

Sleeps are meaningless. Time irrelevant. Days are now doses. His body’s circadian rhythm is marked by one thing only and that’s the drug they give him. The fire burning in his veins. He learns pretty quickly that it’s not a serum or a suppressant but rather the opposite. A stimulant, power that nearly makes his heart stop it’s so much. 

He just has to stay alive. He just has to stay alive long enough for them to come for him. 

He’s stronger than all the scientists and soldiers in this facility but he also knows that if that if he kills them he can’t get more of the drug, though he can’t remember when that started mattering. So he jumps through their hoops and he blows up whatever they want him to blow up and he kills what they want him to kill.

Small livestock, mostly, some desert rabbits. Mostly he just stops their hearts but some days they ask him to try other ways and he complies, he always complies. Until one dose where they bring in a small beagle and Michael loses it so completely that they have to sedate him. They bring back the rabbits after that. He doesn’t know what happened to the dog.

It’s powerful, whatever they give him. It’s addictive. It’s killing him. He thought he knew pain, thought he was familiar enough, but this is a pain that remakes him, chews him up and spits him out every time, a new beast. When he lays in the dark after a dose, skin hurting, organs on fire, all he can do with what limited sanity he has left is hope that he fucking dies before they come again. Because he will be powerless to say no. He will not be able to resist. 

But he always manages to make it through the night, or the comedown, or whatever this darkness is, and they always come for him when it’s done with more. 

Sometimes they ask him to move things. Five ton tanks. Train cars. One particular double dose they ask him to shift the building they’re standing in two centimeters off its foundation and back and Michael does it, blacks out immediately afterward, but does it. 

Those are, believe it or not, the easier doses. 

On the easier doses he thinks that he’s going to get out, tells himself that they’ll make it if he just holds out a little longer, moves this, kills that. He thinks of Max. He thinks of Isobel. He figures better him than them. It’s better this way. He lets their faces guide him like a North Star and he thinks, _they’ll come for me. They’ll come. _

He thinks of Alex. Tries his hardest not to—Max and Isobel were always the thing that grounded him—but Alex worms his way in anyhow. He’s like the lighthouse calling Michael through the fog, present only when Michael is on the brink. 

Sometimes they test his pain tolerance on the stuff. Strap him down to a cold metal table and shoot him up and see how much he can take when he’s on the stuff. They try different things. They are very good at what they do. Those are the doses when he sees Alex the most, as hope leaks out of him like blood. Gives in to indulgence because he’s never been one for self control, puts himself far away from this place as possible, in his trailer, on the pullout couch, Alex’s thumb against the corner of his mouth and Alex brushing kisses against his stomach. Alex, who’d never known kindness in those close to him, yet always so gentle. A paradox in an upbringing sprung from violence. 

Sometimes they ask him questions, when he’s most delirious, when he’s screaming. _Are there others?_ They don’t have names, thank god, they don’t know. He doesn’t even know if they know who he his. He’s ‘it’. He’s ‘the specimen’. The subject. 

He never tells them anything. Either he gives in to unconsciousness or just keeps screaming. But he doesn’t tell them. He’ll never tell them. 

He’s been in the dark so long he doesn’t know how long it’s been. There are track marks on his arms. He thinks he’s going to die here. It’s been long enough. 

The worse part, horrible as it is, isn’t the pain or the animals or blackouts or the burning in his cells. It’s the comedown from a dose. The high fades and the black crowds in, and it’s the death of hope, all over again. The realization that Michael went through all that and still nobody has come to save him. 

They’re not coming. 

No one’s coming. 

Once the thought makes itself at home in his chest, it festers, and he believes it more and more until it’s fact. 

No one’s coming, because nobody ever comes. No one came when they took Max and Iz away. No one came when he sat in a car with a bleeding mangled hand and cried so hard he couldn’t breathe. No one came the first time he ever felt a belt across his back. The first time someone put out a cigarette against his skin. He’d dug his grave years ago and now he was going to lie in it, alone alone alone. 

Once he realizes that, he doesn’t see Alex as much on the edges of consciousness anymore. Like he’s fading along with hope. 

That’s where he’s at right now. Another pain tolerance session. The acetone they gave him helps with the pain the way tylenol helps with a bullet wound. He thinks his feet are dripping blood on the floor. He wonders why they’re keeping him there, until he hears voices enter the room. 

“As you can see, we’ve come a long way with the subject.” Heels announce one of the labcoats. He feels the gate slide open. “The expansion powers of the drug are—astronomical. We think we’re going to try to push the subjects own personal capabilities. We’re wondering if levitation through telekinesis be achieved, things like that.” 

He feels a light shined on him, but Michael doesn’t move. He won’t move until they come to fetch him, and he can tell from the tone of voice that this is strictly observational. 

“It doesn’t look strong at all,” says a new voice.

Dimly, deliriously, Michael’s brain clings to the fact that the voice sounds like a dead ringer to Alex. Alex, if he’d become his father. 

“It’s coming off of a dose right now, so it’s at its weakest. The drug has a cycle. Give us twelve hours, and we’ll show you the capabilities—we’re talking the perfect sleeper agent, with supernatural powers that enemies will never see coming.”

“Color me intrigued, Doctor. Can I see the labs? How does cell regeneration happen?”

“Of course, we’ve got everything on the main computer…” Their voices fade behind the closing door. 

Come back, Michael wants to cry out. He tries to open his eyes, but he can’t. They’re steel curtains, and he’s exhausted. Every digit in his body is a thousand pounds on its own. He’s not going to say anything but he thinks he’s dying. He’s floating in the ocean of unconsciousness more than he’s not. He hopes it’s sooner rather than later. No one’s coming. 

No one’s coming. 

No one’s coming. 

No one’s—

-

He’s stopped being able to remember his name. 

When you grow up alone, without a culture or language or any single thing that’s yours, well, you make up your own fairy tales. That’s what he did, whoever he is. It helped to pass the time. It helped to keep him hopeful. It helped to keep him whole when he wondered if he was just hollow, no heart or bones or soul in him, but a husk, a facsimile of a person. 

Here’s a good one. Goes something like this: 

Once upon a time there was a Prince. But the Prince did not live in a castle. He did not live in a palace. He did not even live in a kingdom. The Prince actually lived in the wrong place, the opposite of home place, a place so far away that he couldn’t see home, no matter how hard he stared up into the sky, no matter how much he wished for home to be closer. 

The Prince was dying. But it wasn’t death like we understand it to be. Death in fairy tales is so often swift. But the Prince had a different kind of death, saddled to his heart like a mule with a cart. He carried it everywhere, that death, and every day it killed him a little more. He was alone in this world, and the longer he carried it, the more it hurt. The Prince was so alone, and so tired. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could wait to return home. 

Then a Knight came, as knights do. The knight hadn’t had an easy life either, for he had never known true kindness. He had been raised in war. But the Knight saw the Prince struggling and offered to help him carry the weight. The Prince was kind to him, and that was everything to the Knight. 

The lonely Prince fell in love, as Princes do. And suddenly the world was not so wide and awful and home did not feel so terribly far away. There was light in the sky, and music in the Prince’s heart. 

But the Prince had a secret. He wasn’t a Prince at all. He had never been a Prince, only maintained the guise of one to hide his true self. The death he carried with him was not just his death but the deaths of others. People he would hurt. People whose lives the Prince would take. A curse. An ugliness. But the Prince loved the Knight with all his heart, or whatever he had to take up that same space. He tried his best to keep it a secret, but the Knight found out anyway. 

There’s an end somewhere in here. Balance restored, happiness returning to the Kingdom. He could never bring himself to tell it though. He could never seem to get past the part before the Knight finds out, before he realizes the truth about the Prince who wasn’t a Prince. 

He tried to work it out in his head, find the loophole. One where the Knight loves the Prince regardless of his secret. One where they run away together. One where the Prince saves the Knight’s life, and its enough to convince the Knight of his humanity, and spare him. There are a million ways to tell the story, but only one possible end. 

The truth about bedtime stories and fairy tales—they’re similar in a few key ways. Regardless of where they originate from, or who they’re about, or who’s telling them.

Here is the thing that he understands about the stories with happy endings: 

There is a heroic knight.

There is a magical far away castle. 

The monster always dies in the end.

-

“Guerin.”

Hurts. 

“Guerin, wake up. C’mon.”

Familiar. Sounds like. 

“Guerin, please.”

Tired. So tired. But. But sounds like. 

“Michael, please open your eyes.” 

It’s the hardest thing he’s ever done.

The Knight, he’s here, gilded in white light like a beacon. Dark brown eyes. Hands on his face. Touch. Feels good. But hurts. Don’t stop. Don’t let go. 

“Michael, can you hear me?” He’s using Michael’s first name, over and over. He must be really fucking scared. Michael must be really fucking hurt. “It’s me, it’s Alex. We’re getting you out of here.” 

“Nnng.” Something’s wrong. Michael’s jaw is locked. His limbs feel like shale, if he moves, he’ll crumble. Did they give up on the drug all together? Start injecting cement into his veins? “A-Alex?”

The word drags out of his throat like his larynx is a pin cushion. 

“Hey.” Alex’s face swims into his vision, and he’s so beautiful, how could Michael forget. How gone he must have been. He makes this sound, like he’s laughing, or maybe he’s crying. “Hey, there you are. Michael, yeah, it’s me. I’m here.”

He’s leaning forward and pressing their foreheads together and his skin is so warm or maybe it’s just Michael who’s so cold and Michael has never, _ever_ known such a good feeling and such a terrible feeling wrapped up in one. It’s so good it hurts. 

“You came.” 

“Of course.” Alex’s breath is hot on his face. “Of course I came for you.”

“I didn’t think you were,” he sounds like an idiot, but he genuinely can’t believe it. He can’t even be sure if he’s hallucinating. It wouldn’t even be the weirdest thing he’s dreamt up in this place. 

Alex gives him a look, but then the sound of Michael’s own words register, and then the meaning of them. Alex came for him, to the place of impossible darkness, to the place where things go to die. He tries to shove Alex away but his limbs won’t coordinate. “Wait—n-no. No. You have to. Get out. Leave. Alex.”

“No, shh.” Alex shushes him. “I’m here to get you out of here. This is a rescue mission.”

Michael’s trying to do the mental math but he’s a few million brain cells short at the moment. “I don’t understand.”

“Listen to me, Guerin,” says Alex. “In about forty five seconds, this whole operation is about to go FUBAR, and everything has to go exactly according to plan if we’re all going to make it out of here in one piece, okay? I need you to trust me and do what I say, regardless of how batshit insane it sounds. Do you promise?”

Alex has to leave now. He’ll never make it out of here if he doesn’t. They’ll kill him. Or worse, they’ll use him as leverage, and Michael will tell them everything, spill every last secret until he’s dried up. “Alex—”

“Answer the question.” 

The lights in the room feel so bright. Like they’re getting brighter, an electrical surge. Something is happening. Something is about to happen. 

“I—” How is that even a question. “Do I have a fucking choice?”

“You don’t, but consent is important,” Alex says, and then he pulls something over his own eyes. Night vision goggles. What the hell is going on? Michael watches, baffled, then panicked, as Alex takes a syringe out of his pocket and pops the lid. “Sorry about this in advance.”

“Wait, what—”

“It’s like I told you,” says Alex, a ghost of a smile on his face. “I owe you one, Guerin.”

He stabs the syringe into Michael’s chest. 

And then the lights go out.

-

He’s not entirely sure Alex didn’t just kill him, but whatever he injected Michael with hits like a small boost of adrenaline. Energy. His limbs no longer jerking and useless without the drug in them. It’s pitch fucking black and in that blackness Alex’s lips brush the shell of his ear, “Don’t move, just give the serum a second to do it’s work.”

“And then what?” Michael gasps.

He feels Alex smile against his ear. Then he moves about the room, grabbing stuff that Michael can’t see, evidently preparing for something. “You ever played possum, Guerin? As soon as those emergency lights come up, we’re going to play the world’s longest game of that.” 

Michael registers his words just as the emergency lights kick in fifteen seconds later, an eerie green glow around the room and Michael gets it. Slumps back. Lets his whole body go limp. Dead as a doornail. 

“Good.” Alex whispers. “Now don’t you dare so much as move a muscle until I give the signal.”

“What’s the signal?” Michael breathes.

“Trust me. You’ll know.” He shoves his arm under Michael’s legs, swings Michael off the table and holds him cradle style. 

Michael’s mind is racing with questions. What’s going on? Why is Alex here? _How_ is Alex here? Michael figured that they had him off the grid, buried so deep no one would find him. Not that he knew where he was being kept. It doesn’t matter. Alex is here. Selfish, Michael presses himself close to Alex’s chest, chasing his scent, but he can’t get to it. He just smells like clean pressed uniform. Alex carries Michael out into the hallway, sterile walls now cloaked in dim lighting and Michael thinks they’re really just going to walk out of here when—

“Captain, where are you going with the subject?” 

“The subject attacked me. Tore right through his restraints. I had to tranquilize it so it wouldn’t kill me.”

“That’s impossible. The subject is pliant under the effects of the drug.”

“Oh really?” The voice that comes from Alex isn’t the voice of the boy that Michael fell in love with when he was seventeen. It’s a soldier’s voice. It’s what two tours of war, a missing limb, and a lifetime of childhood abuse sound like. His voice is cold, commanding. The voice of a killer. The voice of a Manes. “Explain these cuts on my face, doctor.”

There’s a pause, as the doctor seems torn between really arguing the case with Alex, but evidently gives in. There’s a thundering of feet as someone runs down the hallway. Evidently something’s wrong. “We’ll get you both to the med bay, stat. We’re having a power issue at the moment, but we should have everything back up and running in a few moments. Apologies.”

“I certainly hope this is not always how this facility is being run.” Alex sneers. “My father won’t be happy to hear this.”

Genuine fear lances into the doctor’s voice. “They told us Project Shepard had been cancelled. Master Sergeant Manes was—”

“Are you really trying to tell _me_ that there’s only one super government project centered on the existence of extraterrestrials?” The condescension in Alex’s voice is so cutting that Michael almost feels sorry for the doctor. Almost. 

“My apologies, sir. Shall I help you carry the subject to the med-bay?” 

“That won’t be necessary.” Alex’s voice relaxes back into it’s cold, expressionless tone, and it sounds convincing when he says it, but Michael knows he’s reciting a mantra he’s heard before. “Aliens are a blight on this race. They feel nothing, for no one. And they are dangerous. But what my father doesn’t always understand is that they can also be useful, in their own interesting ways. See to it that the subject’s cell is secure so it may return without mishap.” 

“Y-yes sir.” 

Alex jams his finger into what is evidently an elevator button. Michael waits until the doors slide shut, the two of them briefly alone.

“That was kind of hot.” Michael breathes, careful to keep his face slack for the cameras. Alex doesn’t respond, but he squeezes Michael’s arm. 

The door opens, and Alex steps out, changing his tune entirely. “I’m going to need a crash cart. The subject is dying.”

“We’re in the middle of an evacuation, sir, the main generator has been compromised.”

“I can take him.” Another familiar voice swims into Michael’s ear. _Rosa_. The dead girl whose face they won’t be able to trace. 

Another doctor walks over. “Are you new here? What’s your clearance number? I’ve never seen you before.”

“And you never will again,” says Rosa, in a voice that Michael hasn’t heard in years. The voice of a girl who’d get arrested at least once a month for tagging public property. Famous in the town for not giving one iota of a fuck. Not gonna lie, he never knew Rosa Ortecho before she died, but she was kind of his hero. 

Then there’s a loud ringing _zap_, the sound of a charge being given off, and something—someone?—flies across the room and crashes into a cabinet. 

“Nice,” says Alex. “How’s our time?” 

“Good.” Rosa answers. “Max is about to flicker the cameras back on so we can get the grand finale on tape.”

“And Liz?” 

“Setting the charges with him. Iz has got the guard tower guys under control. Kyle and Maria on standby with the getaway cars. If we pull this off, there shouldn’t be a single soul who knows or remembers that we were here.” 

“Michael,” Rosa’s voice sounds above him. “You with us?”

Michael makes the quietest humming noise for a yes. 

“Alright. In about fifty seconds, the security cameras are going to see me shoot you. I’m using rubber bullets. You are going to die. I promise, I _promise_, that I am just going to hit your shoulder with a rubber bullet, Manes too. But I’m going to need you to die. I mean really die.”

“Got any tips?” Alex asks dryly. 

Rosa laughs darkly, and Michael can’t help it—he peeks through his eyelashes to look at her. She doesn’t look like Rosa Ortecho. Her entire head is shaved clean, a sharp platinum blond at the roots. There are blue contacts in her eyes to help disguise her. She looks like an avenging angel, or like fucking Sarah Connor, buff arms and a don’t-fuck-with-me gaze. 

“Don’t drag it out,” she advises. “No one likes a dramatic.” 

Then she raises her gun and shoots. 

Alex dies. Michael dies. The rubber bullet stings on his skin but he does his best to make it look convincing. He hears Alex crumple and groan and it takes everything in him not to leap up from the table and grab him. He lies, he waits. Fifty seconds go by. 

“Okay,” Rosa says. “That should do it. The cameras are back off. Sit up.” 

Michael sits up with a groan, it feels like whatever Alex shot him up with might be wearing off already. His body is tired, bone deep, and he’s already jonesing for another dose of the drug. He can feel the familiar burn in his limbs, glances around at the medical cabinets around him, wonders which one it’s in, how much of it he can sneak. 

He looks at Rosa, collecting the rubber bullets off the floor and at Alex, rubbing a welt on his chest. “Now what?”

Almost as if on cue, the whole building rumbles distantly, like a very targeted explosion was set off. 

Rosa grins, and it’s kind of amazing. She was dead for ten years, and it still wasn’t enough to kill the thing in her that makes her Rosa. “My favorite part. Now we run like hell.” 

To be honest, Michael isn’t sure if he can move. He stumbles and crashes into one of the cabinets, scrabbling for purchase among the shelves before there’s a murmured, “I got you” and Alex is at his side, hauling him up. They move together, Michael shaky on his feet, Rosa blazing a trail for them.

The hallway is a long stretch of metal hull, with red sirens blaring. _Intruder alert. Intruder alert. _

He’s tired, he’s so tired. But Alex has got him and Alex does not waver so Michael refuses to, hobbling after him, forcing his limbs to work through sheer force of will. 

Michael has no fucking idea where he’s supposed to be going but Alex and Rosa seem to know the way. Right. Left. Two rights. Rosa mutters the directions to herself in Spanish. They’re in a dark corridor, footsteps thundering past as people run to evacuate the fortress. Rosa trails her hand across the wall, fingertips feeling for something, a latch. 

The smell, when she peels the wall panel away, is abhorrent. 

“Garbage chute? Really?” 

“Sorry, Guerin, we’ll bring the stretch limo around next time. You can thank your boyfriend for this one, says you gave him the idea.”

He turns to Alex, who shrugs. “Technically it was Princess Leia. Episode four.” 

Michael has never wanted to kiss someone at such an inappropriate moment. 

There’s a shout down the hallway, and then Liz and Max join them. Liz’s hair is wild and her eyes are blazing and Jesus Christ, she’s holding a _gun_. 

Then Iz, wiping her nose on her sleeve, a strange power glow around her. She looks taller than he remembers. 

“Hey brother.” She smiles like a shark. “You look like shit.”

“Thanks.” 

“Guards have realized we’re here,” Max is breathing heavily, leaning into Liz a bit. “We need to go. Now.”

“Not until Maria gives the signal,” Rosa responds, staring at her phone. 

Another shout at the end of the hall, a thundering of feet coming for the door. 

“Rosa…”

“I can’t get service. We’re up too fucking high. I don’t know if she’s—”

The loud bang shakes the doors. A pause. Then another, louder. The hinges groan in protest. 

Michael slides a look over to Alex. “Got any tricks up your sleeve, Captain?” 

“None. You?” 

“Just one,” says Michael, reaching into Alex’s jean pocket where he’d hidden them, sweaty against his palm. “But you’re not gonna like it.” 

He pulls out a lone syringe, loaded up with a triple dose of the cocktail they usually shoot him up with. He’s done double before. But before they ran out of the lab—well, he had a feeling he’d be needing it. 

He hates that he was right. 

Alex eyes the syringe. “Is that—Guerin, you don’t know how much of that drug your system can take.”

“Guess we’ll find out.” 

Alex puts it together a split second too late. “Wait, no—”

But it’s too late. Michael punches the needle into the meat of his arm, pushes down on the plunger. 

The doors burst open. 

First it’s one soldier, then it’s five, then it’s an entire fucking battalion bearing down on them, guns raised, laser dots finding their mark. He feels Alex grip him tighter. He wonders if his leg hurts from carrying Michael’s weight. Ain’t that just a fucking metaphor for this whole situation. 

“Sir, you are surrounded by highly trained soldiers and you are carrying property of the U.S. Government. Surrender now or we will shoot.” 

The drug hits his blood stream. Michael doubles over, electricity ripping up his spine, the current between his cells accelerating, vibrating. The dose is always painful but this is agony that he’s addicted to, bloodstream a symphony with all the instruments out of tune. 

Dimly, Michael acknowledges that this is probably going to kill him. But if he doesn’t move quick, he won’t be the only one to die. 

He wrenches himself up, jerky, a puppet on strings of his own strung-out fury. He thinks he can hear his friends calling his name, but it’s like a shout from the bottom of a canyon, and he’s at the top, the peak, so high they’ll never get to him. The world feels slow around him, smears of color, sound warped. He stands between his family and the line of fire, staring down the sound of a dozen assault rifles being given the signal to fire. 

Michael smirks, lifts his hand. 

The first bullet freezes mid-air. The second. The third, slowed down like they’ve hit wet concrete, nearly immobile. It’s not a forcefield, it’s Michael being able to see each bullet in slow motion, pick it out and slow it down, then onto the next, like a game of connect the dots, almost fun. He slows the last one, registers the soldiers shouting at each other, confused, terrified. Afraid for their lives. 

It’d be easy to kill them. But he can feel Iz and Max, their presence an anchor, and pulls back, quelling that particular urge. 

There’s a rush in the air, like a breath expelled, and entire group of soldiers fly back against the wall, skulls colliding against steel, slumping over unconscious. At the exact same moment, Michael flicks his wrist with his other hand, and the wall of the building peels open like a fucking tin can, no garbage chute neccessary. In the distance, a vehicle. Kyle and Maria. 

Michael turns, eyes searching until he’s grinning at Alex, relieved, heart squeezing when Alex grins back. Feels on top of the fucking world. 

Then suddenly, Alex’s expression drops from relieved to horrified, and he’s running towards Michael. Why’s he running? The fight’s over. He steps toward Alex to assure him _it’s okay, it’s over, we’re safe_, when he sees the wet dark blood dripping to the floor from his stomach. 

“Oh,” he says, looking down. “That’s weird.”

The room slips sideways. Like he stepped in an icy patch on the sidewalk. His name, once again, from the bottom of the canyon, the echo of it fading in until he realizes that Alex is screaming it as he sprints forward. 

“Michael!”

Then the room slips sideways again, and Michael’s tumbling off the top of the canyon as if an earthquake knocked him loose, only the earthquake is inside him, foundation shaking, crumbling apart. 

“Alex?” 

When he hits the floor Alex is there, skidding on his knees to meet him halfway. A litany of, “nononono_no_” tumbling from his mouth. 

“Guerin. Guerin!” His voice is pitched with panic. His hands are clutching Michael’s shoulders, Michael’s face, pressing down on him, on the bullet wound. The ceiling is swirling around, Alex at the center of it all. He seems so far away. Now he’s the one at the bottom of the canyon. 

“Fuck.” Alex’s voice breaks. “Max—”

Max. His voice is a distant roll of thunder. “I can’t. He’s—I don’t know how much of the drug he took. It could kill him.”

“Kyle’s almost here.” Iz. She sounds like she’s crying. “I’ll wipe everyone. Just hold on Michael.” 

“Too far away,” Michael mumbles, staring up, trying to catch Alex’s blurring form. “Can’t see you.”

“Hey.” Alex’s faces swims up in his vision, so close their noses are almost touching. “Hey, hey, it’s okay, I’m here. You’re a little banged up but—it’s okay. We’ll fix it okay. We’ll get you fixed up.”

Alex’s hand sweeps his hair back. His eyes are red. He keeps blinking.

“Sorry.” The word hiccups wetly in Michael’s throat, difficult to get out. There’s so much blood. Michael’s heart is beating so fast. He doesn’t know what he’s apologizing for. Probably everything. That seems like a good place to start. “Sorry. Sorry.” 

“Hey, no, none of that. Don’t talk like that. You’re going to be okay. You have to be okay. How else am I going to kick your ass?”

“‘ll kick _your_ ass.” Michael slurs, starting to feel drunk, he thinks his heart is beating wrong. “So tired.” 

“No, Guerin, wake up, look at me. Fuck,” swears Alex, a bit of fire kicking into his voice. “Don’t you dare look away. You’re not dying on me. No quitter talk.” 

He’s pressing down on the wound with one hand, the other on Michael’s heart. It doesn’t hurt so bad, being shot, though Michael’s pretty sure the fact that it doesn’t hurt is a bad thing. 

“Shouldn’t have come,” he murmurs. “Didn’t think you would.” 

“Shut up,” Alex says softly. His eyes are glistening. “Don’t—don’t talk like that.” 

But Michael can’t seem to shut up. It seems important now, to fling every last thought of his at Alex.

“Look after Max and Iz for me. Deluca, too.”

Alex looks stricken.

“Tell Liz. Notes. Under mattress. Science shit,” a chill racks through Michael’s body and when he coughs, there’s blood on his lips. “You were right. Sometimes. Ends with a whimper.” 

“Nobody’s ending anything. You’re not going anywhere, you hear me? You’re staying right here, okay? And—and we’ll go back to Roswell, and we’ll watch Star Wars all day if you want. But you’ve gotta stay awake. You make it out of here, we’ll do anything you want.” 

“Even karaoke?” 

Alex laughs, but it sounds like a sob. “Even karaoke. I’ll sing, I’ll even let you pick the song. But you gotta stay awake, you hear me? No more talking, no more apologies, just—just stay here. With me.”

“‘Kay.” The world flickers for a moment, like a movie projector freezing between two frames. He closes his eyes. 

Someone shouts his name and he opens them again, looking up into soft brown eyes. He smiles, and thinks wildly to himself that he’s never been more in love than this moment right here, with everything hurting and breaking apart. What a strange feeling. “Alex.” 

Alex is cradling Michael’s head, pressing their foreheads together. Michael has to cross his eyes just to see him properly. He thinks of everything he’s been dying to say and how he likely_ will_ die before he gets the chance. He thinks about the fear on Alex’s face, for Michael, because of Michael. He thinks of Alex with his eyes closed, windows down, wind whistling through his hair, no weight holding down his shoulders. He thinks about the shitty things they both said and wishes he’d been brave enough to say the truth with them. He thinks about the scar over Alex’s left eyebrow and how he doesn’t know where it came from—he’d never asked. He thinks about the stories with happy endings and he thinks about how fucked up it is that there are 6,500 languages on this stupid stupid planet and 171,476 words in the one he speaks fluently and all he can summon up right now is one. Just one. 

“Alex.”

“Guerin.” A whisper against his cheek. 

“Alex.”

“Please—” 

“Alex. Sweetheart,” says Michael, cupping a hand to Alex’s cheek. “Don’t leave behind the dog.”

His eyes shut for the last time. 

-

Michael sleeps for days. 

In the beginning, during the withdrawls, he thinks he calls out in his sleep a lot, like a child crying their way through nightmares. He must, because someone always responds. Every once in a while he partially surfaces from unconsciousness to feel a pair of cool hands sweeping back his hair, pressing a washcloth to his forehead, soothing him. He catches snippets. Voices. Maria. Liz. Max. Iz. Rosa. Max and Iz again. He thinks they’re talking to him, only because every so often he catches the word _bastard _and that feels right. Maybe he’s not sleeping at all. Maybe he’s wide awake, but his mind has simply ceased to exist alongside his body. Like he’s in a coma, unable to emerge even when he’s alert. 

(He hears Alex’s voice once. Just once. A clipped exchange with Kyle, _how’s he doing_ and then mutters that are lost on Michael. He tries to tune in, find out how Alex is, but the exhaustion pulls him back under again.) 

He’s aware, more or less, that one of them sleeps next to him every night, a solid shape in the bed, distanced but there. They don’t make a sound; he can’t tell who. But he feels the warm line of their body next to his. A familiar breathing. Sometimes a brief touch to his shoulder, his face. It’s probably a dream. That’s okay. 

His body is in detox. This Liz tells him the first time he manages to be awake for more than five seconds. The stimulant they were pumping him with basically meant he was never really sleeping, even when it felt like he was, his body was never resting. 

The next time he wakes up, she tells him he was in captivity for 23 days. 

“_Fuck_,” is all he manages, and falls asleep again. 

Kyle and Liz are trying not to stick him with anymore needles but there is some stuff they can’t avoid administering. Michael lets it happen. Hates the panic it brings racing into his heart. But it’s only ever light sedatives, vitamin shots. He wants a double bacon cheeseburger more than anything in the world but Kyle only lets him have acetone. 

They give it to him in pieces. 

Max and Iz knew the second he vanished that something was wrong, but they hadn’t known just how wrong. They’d combed the town, but Michael was long gone. From there, it was back to Roswell, and a search that took them five days to narrow down the exact location. All this while Michael was burning.

The place was like Caulfield—government sanctioned but not in any official way. Funded by politicians with deep pockets and an agenda that placed capital-P Patriotism over everything else. The intent was making biological weapons for war, illegal experiments and the like. There were other developments happening in the lab. Michael wasn’t the only thing they had going. 

Alex wanted to burn the place to the ground when he found it. He did the next best thing. He found every single lobbyist, every politician who funneled money into the project, every scientist who ran illegal tests in the name of discovery, every labcoat that worked on the drug they pumped Michael with, every single person who was cognizant of this operation and did nothing to stop it. Alex found them all and then Alex ruined their fucking lives. 

“It took him two days,” Liz explains to Michael. “He didn’t say anything to us, and then when he came out of the bunker he said everything was set in motion and he had a plan, set up a reason for him to visit the facility and find you. It was honestly kind of scary.” 

Michael finally feels well enough to walk around, pace every corner of Isobel’s house. He’s more or less aware that he’s always with company, never alone except to piss and shower. He thinks they’re taking shifts, keeping an eye on him. He’d tell them to stop, but. It’s honestly kind of nice, after being in captivity long enough to think they'd forgotten about him. 

He doesn’t know how to thank them. He never has. So he channels the guilt into being extra obnoxious and inspiring as many eyerolls as possible and that helps, for a bit. 

Once he’s up and moving around though, he doesn’t see Alex at all. In fact, he sees _literally_ everyone else in their group except for Alex. 

He doesn’t ask, he doesn’t bring it up, but Liz must see his quiet gay-ass anguish eventually because he’s sneaking a peak at the window as Kyle’s truck rolls up and she says, “He was here, you know. For the first few days, until we were sure you were gonna make it. He wouldn’t leave your side.” 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He’s vaguely aware of Max in the other room, taking a shower, but Liz doesn’t seem to care that someone else might hear this conversation. 

“Okay, we can play the denial game. I’m plenty good at that.”

Michael makes a noise of frustration. “Look, it’s not like I’m butthurt that he’s not here to kiss my booboos. Alex can do whatever he wants.”

“He stayed by your side for three days, Michael,” Liz says, not unkindly. “For three days he just. Sat there. Wouldn’t sleep, barely ate. You didn’t see him. The whole drive back, he only let Kyle touch you. He wouldn’t let go of you unless it was absolutely necessary.”

“And then, what, he just decided to bounce?”

“We thought you _died_.” Liz’s eyes water with tears. “You don’t get to—you can’t possibly know how fucking scary that is. Max saved Rosa months ago, and I still wake up in the middle of the night sometimes convinced his heart stopped beating in his sleep, and he was only dead for seven minutes. You were missing for weeks, we didn’t even know if that meant alive or dead and by the time we found you—you sacrificed yourself for all of us and barely made it out by the skin of your teeth. We didn’t know if you were going to make it. He’s allowed to be upset and process that.”

Michael crosses his arms over his chest, defensive. “Yeah, well, sorry to be such a burden on all of you.” 

Liz looks at Michael long and hard, like she’s making her mind up on whether or not she wants to hit him. Then she does something a thousand times worse. She cups his face between her hands, looks him square in the eye. 

“Michael Guerin,” she says fiercely. “If you really think all of us would have done anything less than raise heaven and hell to save you, es_pecially_ Alex, then you’re an even bigger idiot than I thought. You are not, nor have you ever been a burden to us. We’d do it again, no questions asked.”

Something tightens in Michael’s throat. 

She pats his cheek once and pulls away. “But I know I’m not the right person to convince you otherwise. Talk to him.”

Michael makes his bitchiest face. “Why can’t he come and talk to _me_?”

Liz rolls her eyes, patience evidently lost. “Because the boy is currently drowning his sorrows and blaming himself for what happened. Because you’re so head over heels that even _Max_ is pitying you. Yeah, Max Evans, who pined for me his literal whole life, feels bad for _you_. Surely that should tell you something.” 

“I don’t even know what to say,” Michael rasps, desperate. “Where the hell do I even start?”

“Start with the truth. It might hurt like hell, but honestly? He deserves it. He deserves the truth after watching you bleed out in his arms, after what you put him through.”

Michael opens his mouth but Liz cuts him off with a hand. “Don’t apologize to me. We’re family now, bitch. That’s what family does.”

“Family storms covert government lab facilities for each other?” 

At that exact moment, Kyle shoulders through the door (“Good afternoon, team!”) carrying a pepperoni pizza on one shoulder and a fresh first-aid kit with another. He’s wearing Maria’s baseball cap and Liz has got on Max’s sweater and he’s arguing with Isobel on Facetime over what movie to watch together when she gets off work.

“Yeah,” Liz says, turning to Michael with her warmest smile. “Something like that.” 

-

He lazes around as much as he can and far outstays his welcome on Isobel’s couch. Not because he doesn’t want to talk to Alex, more like he’s going over all the things they said to each other the last time they talked and one of them wasn’t dying. Every time he starts to hype himself up, steel himself to go talk to Alex, everything comes flooding back—Alex’s face in Gila Bend, Alex furious in the restaurant, Alex up close and teary-eyed and Alex slamming the door to his car and not looking back. Liz is right. He does need to talk to him. But another part of him is aware that that’s just going to suck no matter how long he puts it off. 

He doesn’t know if Alex still hates him after their fight. He doesn’t know if bygones are bygones. He doesn’t know if Alex is completely unaffected and is currently holing up with another Tinder date. He doesn’t know, and literally everyone in the gang is strangely cagey about it whenever he asks. All of them giving some sort of reply like _shouldn’t you be talking to Alex about this yourself_? whenever he wheedles them for information. It feels like they’re conspiring. He can’t tell whether he hates it or not. 

So he lazes. And he procrastinates. And he crawls the walls trying to predict how Alex feels before he goes in blind. 

For once, Michael would like to not be the guy so pathetically in love with someone so horrifyingly out of his league. Christ, Liz was right _again_, he really is just as bad as Max. 

Then one morning, he’s awake at dawn, looking at Max and Liz where they fell asleep last night, cuddled up on armchair halfway through _The Princess Bride, _her legs stretched across his lap, head tucked under his chin. Michael looks at them, their easy comfort, feels an urgent tug in his chest saying _get up get up go go go_. 

He doesn’t mean to show up at the cabin so early, sunrise backlighting him like some kind of Austen hero in a cowboy hat. But that’s what happens anyway. 

Michael’s halfway up the porch when he realizes he should have showered before heading over here, now racking his brains to try and remember when the last time was that he put deodorant on. It was yesterday, right? Did he brush his teeth? Fuck. 

Four seconds of abject panic later he’s turning heel to dash back to the truck when he hears a muffled bark from inside the cabin, followed by the click of nails as a streak of white and brown comes barreling the open screen door towards him.

Michael gapes. 

The beagle, the fucking _beagle_, gives another short bark, panting, tail wagging nervously at a stranger. 

Panic forgotten, Michael sits his ass right there on the front step and holds out a shaking hand for it to sniff. 

“I’m thinking of keeping her.”

Alex is leaning against the door frame, like he just rolled out of bed, so soft and whole-looking that Michael could _cry_, if he weren’t in the middle of having a very important introduction. 

“Her?” He can’t help the smile that tugs at his lips. A cold nose quivers when it touches his palm, sniffing. 

“Yeah. I don’t know how you knew about her but—we looked in the labs and there she was. Brought her back, got her chipped and vaccinated just yesterday. I was supposed to drop her at a shelter but,” Alex sighs, a rueful twist to his mouth. “Guess I’ve got a soft spot for strays.” 

Animals tend to be pretty untrusting of non-human entities. Cats especially tend to hate him. But the beagle doesn’t seem to mind. She sniffs Michael’s outstretched hand for a long beat and he wonders if she remembers him at all from the lab. It’s only a few moments after that that she’s pressing herself along his hand, his wrist, seeking pets, which Michael is only too eager to give. 

“Her name’s Marvin. A.K.A. Marvin the Martian,” Alex says. “Marv, for short.” 

Marvin the Martian. Like she recognizes her name and loves the sound of it, Marv rolls over in front of Michael, belly up, legs kicking for a belly scratch. Michael is all too happy to oblige, looks up at Alex and smiles for what feels like the first time since waking up, and Alex blinks, surprised, slowly smiles back. 

“Unbelievable,” he says quietly, laughing as her tongue lolls out of her mouth, blissed out on belly scratches from her new alien friend. “It took her a whole day to come near me, poor thing was terrified.”

“You just don’t have the bond that we do, isn’t that right girl?”

Whatever tension might have been writhing in Michael’s stomach is gone now, as Alex moves aside in the doorway and waves him over, “C’mon in. I was just making coffee.” 

Marv scampers inside and Michael follows them both into the kitchenette. He tries to hold everything about this moment in his mind. It feels important to do so. Sunday morning sunlight etching through the window, dust motes, Alex in a clean white henley and grey sweatpants, with the right leg pant bunched up over the prosthetic, the exact space where plastic ends and skin begins. Michael takes a good long look at it. 

“You know, people often avoid looking at it.” Michael immediately averts his eyes, and Alex laughs softly. “Yeah, exactly like that. They think that by pretending there’s nothing there, that my leg is perfectly intact, they’ll be able to act more normal around me. It rarely works.” 

“Do you hate it?” 

Alex shrugs, measuring out coffee and scooping it out into a filter. “Not always. The veteran’s discount is always a perk. And the prosthetic definitely gets me comped drinks and meals depending on where I’m at. I can’t stand the way people look at me sometimes, though. I’ve always hated the pity. But you know that already.”

He does. 

“So,” Alex says, and turns back to the coffee maker. “You’re alive. Should I yell at you before or after we have pancakes?”

He says it so calmly, but that doesn’t stop Michael’s nerves from squirming all over again. He wonders vaguely if it's too late to escape and take that shower. “You’re yelling at me?”

Alex nods. “Oh yeah, Guerin. It’s been pencilled in for weeks now.” 

“Um.” Great. Cannot fucking wait. “After?” 

Alex nods, like he agrees, opening the fridge and groping for a carton of buttermilk. “After it is. Banana or chocolate chip?”

They end up springing for both, because Michael hasn’t had a decent non-green-smoothie meal in days and yeah he might throw up but it’s totally worth it. They don’t say much, but Alex makes pancakes like it’s a regular Sunday morning, and this is just something they do. Marv takes a nap in the sun at their feet. 

Michael forks a mouthful and lifts it to his mouth before pausing. “Should I be worried about putting this in my mouth?” 

“I’ve been practicing,” Alex answers coolly, and leaves him to weigh the risk factor. 

Turns out there was no need to worry—the pancakes are delicious, and Michael eats three. They don’t really talk, which is great because Michael is too busy stuffing his face full, but it’s so strangely peaceful that he almost wonders if Alex was being sarcastic about the yelling part. 

But then he takes the plates from the table and sets them in a sink with a clatter, and only then does Michael realize that his hands are _shaking_. 

Alex presses his palms on the counter for a beat, then turns around, eyeing Michael with an expression that’s impossible to decipher. Like he’s looking at Michael and he doesn’t know _what_ to think of him. 

What he settles for is: “You’re a real pain in the ass, you know that, Michael Guerin?” 

Alright then, cutting to the punch. “That’s a rhetorical question, right.”

Alex snorts, it’s evidently taking him a second to warm up. “Yeah, it was. Let’s try a real one then. What the everliving _fuck_ were you thinking?”

“Um. Could you. Be more specific.”

“I guess we’ll start with how you, oh I don’t know, went and got yourself captured. That’s one, for starters. Then there’s the whole thing where how, when we’d just got you back, instead of letting us fight our way out, you decided to shoot yourself with a triple dose of whatever poison they were putting into you.” Alex starts counting the reasons off on his fingers. “And then, because you apparently cannot deal with _not_ having the spotlight, you have to go and get yourself shot too. So, I don’t know. Maybe I’m overreacting here, demanding an explanation, but I feel like I deserve one. Seeing as you were dying in my arms. What the fuck were you thinking? How could you be so—so—”

“Don’t hold back now,” Michael growls, feeling just a tad defensive. 

“So goddamn _stupid_. Jesus _fucking_ Christ. I had it under control. I had a plan, I was going to get you out. You did not have to come along and fuck everything up. In fact, very much would have preferred you _not_ doing that.” 

“You—” Michael takes that in. “Wait. What?”

“This was my rescue mission, Guerin. My time to save you, and you couldn’t let me have that. I had one job, one fucking job. And I couldn’t even do it. You wouldn’t let me. You couldn’t even let me do that.”

“So, what, now you’re mad at me because I saved your life back there?”

Alex laughs, a short awful sound. “If only it were that simple. No, Guerin. I’m pissed. I’m pissed because you have saved my life so many fucking times that I don’t even know where to begin on paying you back. I’m mad because the one time I think, ‘Okay Manes you piece of shit, you can finally make good on your promise and do right by him, you can save him back,’ you still somehow manage to come along and fuck my whole plan up. It’s like you’re hell-bent on dying for me.”

“Not...not hell-bent,” says Michael weakly. “Moderately determined, possibly.”

“Do _not_ joke about this,” snarls Alex. “I could kill you. I really could.”

“Hold up.” Michael’s mind snags on something. “What do you mean I’ve saved your life so many fucking times? Twice, okay, but that’s not really a big deal. Is this—,” Michael’s eyes widen. “Is this what you meant, when you came and got me out? You said you owed me and I didn’t get it at the time, but.” 

“Freshman year,” Alex says quietly. He looks miserable. “After World History. You dragged me into the bathroom, the cover-up? Please tell me you remember and I’m not just making an idiot of myself.”

“I remember.” The gears are turning furiously in Michael’s head. He can hardly keep up. “And you’ve just been, what, keeping a tally all these years?”

Alex stares at him. “Yes? What else would I have been doing? I told you, Guerin, I owed you—”

“You don’t owe me shit. You’re not—this isn’t a _currency_, Alex. I didn’t do it because I wanted something from you. And I sure as hell wouldn’t have done it if I knew you were going to turn it into a guilt trip on yourself for over a decade.” 

“It’s not just that.” Alex cuts him off. “Maybe if it were just the one time I could write it off but—fuck. Michael. There were so many incidents that I can hardly keep track. That time you picked me up and drove me out to Foster Ranch. At prom, when you got in between me and Kyle. That time when my dad—,” he cuts off, nostrils flaring. “You’re always stepping between me and whatever I’m up against. I mean, Jesus Christ, you even eat the fucking purple Skittles out of the bag so I don’t have to.”

Michael blinks. “Well, you hate purple Skittles.”

“Everyone hates purple Skittles,” Alex exclaims. “They’re objectively the worst fucking flavor, everyone knows that. But don’t you get it? You ate them before I even had the chance. That’s what you _do,_ Guerin. You run out to meet the pain head on before it can touch anyone else. And I can’t—I can’t compete with that, okay?”

“Who said you had to?”

“I do!” Alex yells. “I’m a fucked up vet with a trauma-filled childhood and a goddamn missing leg and you—you’re a fucking X-File with superpowers. I’ve seen you open a fucking wall like it was nothing. I watched you take a bullet and not even flinch. I can’t just let you do these things for me and not be able to do something back.” 

“Alright,” Michael breathes, getting riled up. “You wanna settle your tally? Fine. When we were seventeen, you gave me a guitar. You gave me a place to live when I was literally homeless. You,” Michael swallows, an inconvenient lump rising in his throat. “You kissed me, and for a second I forgot I wasn’t human. You help Iz with her PTSD and you went back and saved the fucking dog. And yeah, you’re a pain in my ass, probably more trouble than you’re worth, and you sure as hell don’t make it easy, but it’s not a—this isn’t a tit for tat sort of thing, you don’t _owe_ me anything, Alex.” 

“Those things you just listed are not the same thing, Guerin.”

“Sure looks like it from where I’m standing.” 

“I just wish you weren’t so fucking reckless. Cover-up is one thing but—you could have _died_, Guerin. You could have died, and I would have spent the rest of my miserable life knowing that is was my fucking fault.”

“You’re acting like there was a gun to my head, like you _forced_ me to do it. Well, newsflash, you didn’t. I’m not a soldier like you. I’m not saving anyone because it’s my duty or because I have no choice in the matter.”

“Then why?” Alex pleads. “Why would you try and get yourself killed for me?”

“Why?” Michael shouts incredulously. “Because I’m in love with you, you stupid asshole! So yeah, I took a bullet for you. I love you and I need you alive; I didn’t even hesitate. And guess what? I’d do it again.” 

He’s at least expecting the statement to surprise Alex or shock him into silence, but Alex scoffs, voice bitter. “You love me, huh? Then how come you didn’t think that I would come to rescue you. You didn’t believe I even cared.”

“I didn’t say I thought you loved me back. I mean, c’mon now. I’m a masochist but I’m not an idiot.” 

“You—” Alex stares off to the side for a beat, and it’s almost like he dissociated. “Oh my god I am truly going to kill you.”

“Join the club, I think you’re in line behind Liz.” 

Alex looks at him, then he deflates, asking the question like he’s dreading the answer. “Did you really not think I was going to come for you?” 

Michael halts. “I’d hoped. But the longer time went on down there the more unlikely it seemed, and. And I know what I said to you the last time I saw you. I knew I’d hurt you.”

“I was pissed, sure. But that didn’t mean I was going to leave you to die, Guerin, Jesus.”

“I know that. I do. I just didn’t think.”

“Yeah,” snorts Alex. “I’m sensing a theme here.”

A brief pause, where they just sort of stare at each other, taking in the ruins around them, these shitty walls they have to tear down, between all of Michael’s pessimistic assumptions because he learned too early that to be alive is to hurt and all of Alex’s righteous fury, because he was raised to think that love was conditional, paid in favors and duty and acts that you owe. 

“Alex,” Michael pleads, feeling so out of his depth he’s not sure where to start. “I just told you that I’m in love with you and you’re threatening murder. You can’t—I’m shit at signals. Like we’ve confirmed, I’m an idiot. Spell it out for me.”

Alex looks at him, braces his shoulders. “When I said we weren’t friends, when I tried to kiss you after my date—I didn’t say that because I didn’t want to know you or because I hated you.”

He pauses, as if gauging whether Michael is going to bolt. 

“I meant what I said, though. I can’t be friends with you, because I can’t not be in love with you. It’s not fair to pretend like I can offer that. I can’t. Even when you’ve clearly moved on.”

“Maria? We broke up.”

“There are other ways of moving on.” Alex’s eyes flicker down to Michael’s hand. 

Michael flexes it on instinct. “This? Max _healed_ me. Without asking if he could. I didn’t ask for this. It just happened.”

“But—,” Alex’s eyes cloud over. “Then you—”

“I don’t have an excuse for DeLuca,” says Michael honestly. “I liked her, plain and simple. But with you, it’s...”

He trails off, and sees something give in Alex’s expression, a glimpse of vulnerability. 

Liz’s words, buzzing in his ear like a fly, he deserves the truth. 

“Look, you don’t know what it’s like to be in love with you.” Michael runs a hand through his hair, trying to put it into words. “You know that symbol I draw sometimes? Max’s tattoo, the one that keeps cropping up in old photos we’re finding in the town archives—the image we still haven’t cracked?”

Alex nods. 

“We think it’s a beacon. Max, Iz and me. Like a fucking bat signal. Something calling us home, no matter how dark it is or how far away we are, no matter how long it’s been. That’s what being in love with you is like. You’re the thing that calls me back home. You think you’re lacking—like you have to pay me back because somehow you think that being who you are means you’re less than me, and. Alex. You are brighter than anything that I know about you—your family, your shitty dad, your wars. You’re better than all of that. It’s not even what I see when I look at you. I just see your light, and your warmth, and your weird affection for British baking shows. I just see you.”

“If anything,” Michael tacks on with humor, “I’m the one with some serious catching up to do in the ‘out of my league’ race.”

Alex huffs. “How can you say that. You’re like. The kindest most self-sacrificing selfless bastard I know.”

“Do you mean selfish?”

“I mean self_less_. Good. Down to your bones. I’ve known it since freshman year. And if anyone wanted to contest it, I’d have an entire list of receipts to show them. It’s in PowerPoint format. 500 Reasons Michael Guerin Is Good. Hell, I practically have it memorized, because it’s the one that I’ve spent—oh, maybe my entire life trying to figure out how I can be deserving enough of the person behind it.”

“You are,” says Michael, throat tight. “You already are. Always were. Alex, you _saved_ me.”

“And you saved me,” says Alex. “Over and over and over again. So, yeah, of course I love you, dumbass. I love you, and I’m still so mad at you for almost dying in my arms. Those things are not mutually exclusive. But don’t you dare for a second think that I don’t care. I stormed a government facility for your ass.”

Michael laughs. “I don’t want to put the blame on anyone here, but we’re terrible at talking about our feelings.” 

“Maybe a little,” admits Alex. “But we’ve got time to figure it out. Let’s just aim for less near-death experiences, more verbal communication for now. Start small.”

Communication. Right. Michael flounders to think of something honest. “I didn’t think you noticed the Skittles.”

“Yeah, well.” Alex looks so so fond. “I noticed.”

“So you saved me.” Michael’s heart feels too big for his ribcage. “Does that mean I get to thank you?” 

Alex shakes his head, eyes glittering. “Between you and me, Guerin, I’d rather you just kissed me instead.” 

“Works for me,” says Michael, and strides across the scuffed wood floor and crushes their mouths together. 

The windchimes on the porch tinkle and the morning air swells with quiet like the whole world and its noise decided to stop just for the two of them. Alex pushes off the counter to meet him, tangling his fingers in Michael’s hair like he wants to keep him there forever. 

Michael pulls back and strokes his thumbs over Alex’s cheeks, gentle, making direct, aching eye contact when he leans in to kiss Alex again, quick and close mouthed, then again, just because he can. Then Alex makes an impatient noise and crowds closer, direct, showing Michael exactly what he wants and how he wants it, and Michael lets his mouth fall open because there’s never been a single thing he’s been able to deny Alex. 

Their mouths slide together, warm and wet, familiar dizzying pressure. They know this song and dance, this part isn’t new. Alex’s teeth on worrying at his bottom lip and Michael gasping into his mouth. But it feels new, something about the sunlight, about the open window and the breeze drifting through, something about the way Alex sighs into his mouth. 

They’ve only ever been on borrowed time—stolen kisses in garden sheds and quick fucks with the knowledge that come morning one of them would be gone. There’d always been this unstated urgency when they kissed. A tear-our-clothes-off-because-we-don’t-know-how-long-we-have rush. Always the threat of someone walking in, of reality crashing over their heads. For the longest time Michael just thought that’s how they were always going to be. Ships in the night, asteroids on a collision course, meant to knock and shatter and spark but always meant to part once more. 

For the first time Michael finds himself in this curious new reality where he gets to kiss Alex Manes and _not_ have to worry about making this count because he doesn’t know when the next kiss will be. 

Alex said they have time, so. Michael takes it. 

He kisses Alex’s lips, his cheeks, his dark brow, the soft underside of his jaw where there’s a five o’clock shadow, his temples. 

“Guerin,” Alex shudders beneath his mouth, tugging at his hair, that slight sting that Michael loves. “What are you doing?” 

“This.” He kisses his way down Alex’s neck, the hollow of his throat, things they’ve done before, places they’ve walked, but at this slow slow pace. 

For Michael, this particular sort of indulgence—lazy makeouts, lying naked in bed all day, kissing just to kiss—it’s sort of his thing. In a completely nihilistic way, Michael figures he’s suffered enough in this lifetime to partake in things that feel good to him. 

Alex isn’t like that. Alex usually kisses like he’s expecting to be torn away at any second, like he knows it can’t last, and ends it before it gets a chance to. Alex moves quick just to prove he can.

Now, however, beneath Michael’s mouth, hands, Alex trembles, tips his head back, breath caught in his throat. Like there’s more of an internal struggle than he realizes—holding still under this sort of attention. Not because he doesn’t like it, but because he doesn’t know what to do with it, how to receive it when it has a direction other than _clothes off now_. 

Michael works with him, keeps their bodies flush, doesn’t give him space to overthink it, sucks at a patch of skin on Alex’s collarbone, and revels in the noise Alex makes, like he’s already coming apart at the seams. 

“_Guerin_,” he groans, half annoyance half pleasure. “You’re killing me.”

Michael’s responding grin falters a second later when Alex retaliates, tugging his hair none-too-gently and finding a spot behind Michael’s ear that sends cascade of shivers down his back. Then, right when Michael’s sucking in a gasp, he pulls back, pecks his lips, his cheeks. 

Alex snatches Michael’s hand where it’s running a path through his hair. Then, slowly, making eye contact that aches in Michael’s chest, Alex lowers his mouth to brush against the taut skin of Michael’s knuckles—the left hand, of course. Max healed it months ago but Alex brushes a kiss there, against the once-shattered bone, and Michael swears a residual hurt fades completely under the warmth of Alex’s mouth. Like there was a part of the wound even his brother couldn’t fix. Alex turns Michael’s hand over, kissing his calloused palm, the delicate skin of the inner wrist, and then releases it, looking almost shy.

“A beacon, huh?” murmurs Alex. “Who knew you were such a poet?” 

“Shut up,” says Michael. “I was being romantic.”

“You called me _sweetheart,_ too. Don’t think I forgot.”

“Yeah well, I was dying of blood loss and a drug overdose. Clearly not in my right mind. Never gonna happen again.” 

“Hm. What a shame.” Alex smiles slyly, tips his forehead against Michael’s, the touch of his lips ghosting. “I kind of liked it.” 

He bursts out laughing at the truly idiotic expression on Michael’s face, this loud beautiful sound born out of a place within him that is new, carved entirely from joy. Marv barks for attention, running in circles around their ankles, but Michael sways forward like he’s drunk and captures Alex’s mouth again, kissing Alex’s open smile, the shape of it. Kissing him with a fury. 

No, not fury. The opposite of that. Whatever hot wind kicks up dust devils, sends desert snow drifting for miles looking for a safe place to land, whatever wild cosmic energy keeps stars glowing billions of lightyears away, whatever force in this world keeps hope lit in human hearts. He kisses Alex with that, sliding his hands along the warm dip of Alex’s back to press against the dimples there, not because he wants Alex naked but because he wants to touch him, to be close to him, to feel his pulse and his breath and everything else that makes him so wonderfully fallibly human. Everything else Michael loves about him. 

Everything else Michael thinks of as _home_. 

*

the end. 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading <3


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